Floating tone noun class prefixes in Mada (Nigeria)

Mada [mda], a Plateau language spoken in central Nigeria, has many seemingly inexplicable tone alternations that occur between the singular and plural forms of nouns. These alternations find straightforward and reasonable explanations if one assumes the existence of underlying representations that include floating tone prefixes and certain nouns with toneless stems. Another fascinating aspect of Mada addressed in this paper is that despite there being no other evidence of consonant-tone interaction in the language, there is a direct correlation between the proposed floating tone singular prefixes and the surface realizations of the singular diminutive prefix: diminutive nouns with floating (L)- prefixes take only və̄-, and those with floating (H)- prefixes take only fə́-.