ToneFrames

Tone Frames in A-Z+T

Tone Frame Design

In order to sort tone data in A-Z+T, you have to have tone frames defined. There is a tool in A-Z+T to help you define your tone frames, but help designing your tone frames is beyond the scope of A-Z+T (though see Develop draft tone frames below for some ideas). How to design good tone frames is covered in a field methods course in some graduate linguistics programs, and you have find further help in Keith Snider's Tone Analysis for Field Linguists (2018). I have also made these videos that show good frames. If this is not enough for you, you should get help from a linguist that can do this with you. It involves syntactic analysis for each of the grammatical categories that you will study.

If you must work in the absence of someone to help you design your tone frames, you can always define a frame and use it, and see what you get. If you do this, please understand that you may be doing more work than you need to —though this may be preferable to having to wait for a trained linguist to get started (see my further recommendations below).

Once you design frames you want to use, see the next section for technical notes on how to define the frame in A-Z+T.

Tone Frame Definition

If you don't have any tone frames set up yet, you will be asked to do so when you try to sort on tone. You can also do that in the Advanced menu, for as many frames as you want to define. Note the name is important, as this is how you will refer to this frame in A-Z+T, and how it will be identified in your database in the future (unless and until you change that). So if you're testing the plural form, something like "Pl" or "Plural", or "Pluriel" might be appropriate --but this is just a name, so make it distinct but useful to your workflow.

I hope the Add Tone Frame window is otherwise clear, though two points are in order:

Keyboarding Tone Frames

I have seen at least one MS Windows system, where keyboarding that takes multiple keystrokes to produce a character (like 'n'+'>' → 'ŋ') showed up as '?' in the entry field. If this happens, do not ignore it, as this will be on every window, and added to your database examples. Rather, type the correct characters into another program (e.g., a text editor), then cut and paste into this field, and it should appear correctly.

Agreement in Tone Frames

The frame calculator is not particularly smart; it only puts content before and after the form and gloss(es) for each word, so you need to give it that information. If that information (in the form or gloss) alternates in agreement or harmony with the lexicon word forms, you should think through how you want to resolve potential clashes. The two main options are

• including all options in the frame:
  • pl form: '__s/z/ɪz' (with all forms given for each word in that frame)
• or allowing for ungrammaticality:
  • pl form: '__s' (knowing that <dʒədʒ>+pl will come out <dʒədʒs>, not <dʒədʒɪz>)

The user will have the option to skip a word that doesn't work in a frame. This was put there for syntactic or semantic clashes, but could be used to exclude phonologically weird frame combinations, too.

Once you have the form and gloss content in the appropriate boxes, click on 'see it on a word from the dictionary', and you will get the frame as you have defined it applied to some word (in the filter you have currently set). You can try this on a number of words; continue to click that button, to see how it will look on different entries. There is no easy way to change this frame after you define it (other than deleting them all and starting from scratch), so I encourage you to take your time before moving on. When you are happy with the frame, click on "use this tone frame".

If you absolutely regret a tone frame you have set up, all your frames are stored in <lift filename>_ToneFrames.py next to your LIFT file. Be careful editing this, though; you may need to redefine all your frames if you corrupt this file (This would be a great time to ask for help if you don't absolutely certainly know what you're doing).

Recommended Field Work Process:

Develop draft tone frames

• See Tone Frame Design above for a description of this task.
• Work with one speaker, as this can be a lot of work, and doesn't typically require group discussion.
• You want at least four frames, such that
  • Each frame gives a different tonal melody than the other frames (choose 1, 2, or 3):
    • 1. just one tone before or after each word:
      • High tone immediately before the word (H__)
      • High tone immediately after the word (__H)
      • Low tone immediately before the word (L__)
      • Low tone immediately after the word (__L)
    • 2. just one tone on each side of each word:
      • (L__L): Low tone immediately before the word, Low tone immediately after the word
      • (H__L): High tone immediately before the word, Low tone immediately after the word
      • (H__H): High tone immediately before the word, High tone immediately after the word
      • (L__H): Low tone immediately before the word, High tone immediately after the word
    • 3. Same as two, but some extra content outside the tones immediately before/after the word.
    • Syntax can have unexpected impacts on tone, so it is best to keep the morphosyntactic complexity of these frames
      • the same across all frames
      • as minimal as possible
    • Be careful of frames that look different, but give the same results:
      • In a noun-noun construction, a preceding/following H noun v L noun would NOT give tonally distinct frames if there is any tone separating them (e.g. genitive marker), whether that tone is H or L, as it would be the same tone for H or L nouns. If that genitive marker varies, e.g., agrees with a head noun class, then the situation is more complex, making it more important to control for noun classes and their effects in your frames
  • Each frame can be used with almost all words in the class for which they were designed (i.e., noun or verb).
• This may take several hours, or longer.
• If you don't already understand what this entails, you will need help from a linguist near you.
• If you think you do already understand what this entails, please watch these videos, just so we're on the same page.

Test Your Tone Frames in A-Z+T

• Instructions to define tone frames are above.
• Do more extensive testing of your tone frames, again with one speaker.
  • You can test a frame with more words, more quickly, by doing some sorting in A-Z+T.
  • confirm that word-frame combinations look OK, and
  • confirm that most words work in each of the frames. If a frame has many words that don't work in it, you should probably replace it.
  • ATTENTION: to confirm your tone frames will give you what you need for tone analysis:
    • sort one syllable profile of about 25 words
      • in each of your proposed frames,
      • for each of nouns and verbs.
    • Record all that data, then
    • send this data to me (or someone else who can confirm this for you) before doing a lot more sorting.