Le comportement tonal des marqueurs prédicatifs dans la langue kakabé
Résumé
The paper deals with the question of the correlation between 1) tonal independence and
phonological weight of a morpheme and 2) the grammaticality of its meaning in the Kakabe
language. In Kakabe morphemes with grammatical meaning, such as auxiliaries, different
verbal and noun affixes etc. tend to contain only one light syllable and to possess no lexical
tone of their own. The case of the post-subject auxiliary markers, which is in the focus of
the paper, is especially revealing of the correlation between phonology and grammatical
function of a morpheme. Syntactically, these markers occupy an intermediate position
between the defendant affixes and more free lexical morphemes. This is mirrored at the
phonological level in the fact that the paradigm of auxiliaries comprises both tonally
dependent markers consisting of only one light syllable and markers which have their own
tone and consist of more than one syllable.