The tonal behavior of predicative markers in the Kakabe language

The paper deals with the question of the correlation between 1) tonal independence and phonological weight of a morpheme and 2) the grammaticality of its meaning in the Kakabe language. In Kakabe morphemes with grammatical meaning, such as auxiliaries, different verbal and noun affixes etc. tend to contain only one light syllable and to possess no lexical tone of their own. The case of the post-subject auxiliary markers, which is in the focus of the paper, is especially revealing of the correlation between phonology and grammatical function of a morpheme. Syntactically, these markers occupy an intermediate position between the defendant affixes and more free lexical morphemes. This is mirrored at the phonological level in the fact that the paradigm of auxiliaries comprises both tonally dependent markers consisting of only one light syllable and markers which have their own tone and consist of more than one syllable.