Keith Snider, one of the world’s most distinguished experts on tone, provides an extremely useful, clear, and comprehensive introduction aimed at students, scholars, and field workers who want to know how pitch is exploited in African and other tone languages. Focusing first on methodological issues arising from the interpretation of pitch contrasts, the author then carefully guides us through questions of phonological and orthographic analysis. Drawing from his extensive research on Chumburung (Kwa; Ghana) and other languages, Tone analysis for field linguists is a book that those venturing out into the world of tone will want to have on their home or office shelf and by their side in the field.
Larry M. Hyman Professor of Linguistics, University of California, Berkeley; President, Linguistic Society of America (2017)
Anyone who is about to undertake fieldwork on a language they suspect might be tonal needs to have this book at their side. Snider leads the reader step-by-step through the questions they need to ask, the ways to control their data collection and analysis, and even how to represent their findings in a practical orthography. It also contains much of value for the desk-bound linguist working on the analysis of tonal languages, for whom it should raise an awareness of the potential pitfalls in interpreting tonal data gathered by others, not all of whom will have been as careful as Snider in their methodology.
Moira Yip Emeritus Professor of Linguistics, University College London; Author of Tone (Cambridge University Press)
Students training to be linguists often find tone a scary topic. Reading about tone in some languages may make them feel they are facing a poorly discernible creature with uncontrollable tentacles reaching into every part of the phonology and morphosyntax. At a comfortable pace, this book will guide them through a methodologically explicit account of how to observe and analyse tone, by ear and through acoustic analysis, written from the perspective of the author’s first-hand experience with describing one such language in detail.
Carlos Gussenhoven Emeritus Professor of General and Experimental Phonology, Radboud University Nijmegen; Author of The Phonology of Tone and Intonation (Cambridge University Press)
Keith Snider’s book addresses a major problem in learning how to do linguistic field work, that tone is seen as very mysterious. Taking the perspective of the student who knows nothing about tone, he demystifies the problem by explaining the steps of tonology from auditory discrimination to systematic phonological analysis. Students will learn the major factors known to be relevant to tone, such as how segmental structure, prosody, morphology and grammar can affect tone. Especially useful is the chapter on Chumburung, which gives an extensive model of how a tonal analysis should be done and documented.
David Odden Emeritus Professor of Linguistics, Ohio State University; Author of Introducing Phonology (Cambridge University Press)
