Keith L. Snider (D.Litt. Leiden University) has specialized in issues related to tone since his fieldwork in Ghana with the Chumburung in the 1980s. He has participated in or led workshops dealing with tone and orthography for over fifty languages, and teaches a course on tone analysis for SIL International.
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)
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