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Tone is used:

  • in an abstract sense: Tone is a system of linguistic oppositions based on the pitch difference (e.g., “language X has tone”);
  • in a specific sense: Tone is a tonal contour (tonal level or melody) of underspecified phonological status.

Tonal level is a distinctive pitch range relevant for the tonal system.

Toneme is a basic unit of tonology which can distinguish lexical and/or grammatical meanings. More details here.

Tonal span: the part of the segmental chain on which a toneme is realized on the surface level.

Tonal melody is a stable combination of tonemes mapped on a segment (most often, a word) of a variable size.

Tonal phrase: a maximal domain for tonal processes consisting of two or more than two prosodic words.

Floating tone : We use definition by Rolle & Lionnet (2020): “Floating tones are defined as tones in a representation which are not associated to a tone-bearing unit. This representation may be either part of the underlying form of a morpheme, or arise at some derivational stage.”

Downdrift and downstep: Downdrift is a spontaneous lower realization of H or M after a L. Downstep, in most cases, is a lowering of a non-initial H if preceded by a floating L, in the context H!H. In some languages, the (non-automatic) downstep it is also possible between two M or L. (In Stewart’s terms, downdrift = downstep, and downstep = non-automatic downstep.)

Extratonal syllables: syllables not included into tonal spans.

Zero tone is a default tone which has no status of toneme in a language.

Culminativity of tone: Culminativity means that there can be, at maximum, only one toneme (underlying tone) per word. Culminativity does not require every word to have a toneme; a system can be regarded as culminative even if there are toneless words.

Obligatoriness of tone: The obligatoriness means that any word form bears at least one toneme, or it is included into a tonal span of a neighbouring word.

Tonal density is expressed in the Tonal Density Index (TDI) which equals the number of tonemes per 100 segmental units. More details here. TDI based on different segmental units (morae, syllables, words, etc.) for the sampled languages are shown in the ThoT Database, in the section Sampled languages (for each language, click on “Texts”, et the end of the line).