Le comportement tonal des marqueurs prédicatifs dans la langue kakabé

International audience The paper deals with the question of the correlation between 1) tonal independence andphonological weight of a morpheme and 2) the grammaticality of its meaning in the Kakabelanguage. In Kakabe morphemes with grammatical meaning, such as auxiliaries, differentverbal and noun affixes etc. tend to contain only one light syllable and to possess no lexicaltone of their own. The case of the post-subject auxiliary markers, which is in the focus ofthe paper, is especially revealing of the correlation between phonology and grammaticalfunction of a morpheme. Syntactically, these markers occupy an intermediate positionbetween the defendant affixes and more free lexical morphemes. This is mirrored at thephonological level in the fact that the paradigm of auxiliaries comprises both tonallydependent markers consisting of only one light syllable and markers which have their owntone and consist of more than one syllable.