Exploring written ambiguities can help assess where to mark tone

Abstract

In certain tone languages, orthography stakeholders are open to the possibility of some kind of partial representation of tone. But how can the researcher know for sure which parts of the language need to be targeted for disambiguation? This article proposes that analysis of written ambiguity can help to answer this question. It is a method involving three stages: the development of a homograph corpus, a frequency and distribution analysis of homographs in natural texts and a miscue analysis of oral reading performance. The method is applied to Kabiye (Gur, Togo), the standard orthography of which does not currently mark tone. The conditional clause is traced through each of these three stages, ending with a proposal for its modification. This method demonstrates the extent to which the Linguistics of Writing can enrich a debate that has long been dominated by utterance-based phonological analysis.