Tons et morphologie en tai lü

Résumé 0

‘Tai lü’, a tai-kadai language spoken in Xishuangbanna Dai Autonomous Prefecture (China), has six lexical tones. Based on primary linguistic data collected between 2017 and 2018, the present study describes notable variations of segments as well as tonal patterns found in several nouns for aliments in Tai lü. This article argues that the variations observed consist of an interactive mechanism between tones and morphology. Particular attention is paid to the tonal patterns of nouns for aliments, where six innovative contours are used instead of the six lexical tones. More precisely, the six innovative contours reveal the stability of tones in contemporary Tai lü. The mechanism is triggered by the segmental ellipsis of the morpheme /mak24/ "fruit" inside of a compound noun for an aliment, which links the lexical tone of /mak24/ "fruit" to the following morpheme for an aliment because of tonal stability, therefore creating six innovative contours. Ultimately, the present study adopts the perspective of dynamic synchrony, which focuses on the determination of the conservative or innovative nature of all these variations, on the identification of related internal and/or external factors, and on the evaluation of their direction of change.