Documenting grammatical tone using Toolbox: an evaluation of Buseman’s interlinearisation technique

For tone languages, particularly those found in Africa, it is often the case that important grammatical distinctions depend solely on the occurrence of different tone patterns on a particular noun or verb. The goal of this paper is to consider how the grammatical contribution of such tone patterns should be represented in the annotations within documentary corpora. After introducing certain tone phenomena from Cicipu, a Benue-Congo language spoken in northwest Nigeria (section 2), I will challenge the view that it is not appropriate to make explicit the effects of tone patterns in interlinear annotations (section 3), and review a technique devised by Alan Buseman of the Summer Institute of Linguistics for handling tone using the software program Toolbox (section 4). Based on the evaluation of this technique as applied to a corpus of Cicipu texts (section 5), I suggest some recommendations for the future development of interlinearisation software (section 6). The technique devised by Alan Buseman is suggested as a compromise between more complex techniques such as Advanced Glossing which make detailed linguistic annotation possible at the expense of visual compactness and speed of processing, and simpler techniques which fail to capture the link between tone patterns and meanings at... Language Documentation and Description, Vol. 6 (2009)