be realised as High or Rising and the Non-High toneme may be realised as Low or Mid. The tones of Gbe nouns are often affected by the consonant of the noun stem. The voicing of this consonant affects the realisation of the Non-High toneme roughly as follows: If the consonant is a voiced obstruent, the Non-High toneme is realised as Low (è-ḏà 'snake') and if the consonant is a voiceless obstruent or a sonorant, the Non-High toneme is realised as Mid (ām̲ē 'person', à-f̱ī 'mouse'). The consonants that induce tonal alternations in this way are sometimes called depressor consonants. Morphology The basic syllable form of Gbe languages is commonly rendered (C1)(C2)V(C3), meaning that there at least has to be a nucleus V, and that there are various possible configurations of consonants (C1-3). The V position may be filled by any of the vowels or by a syllabic nasal. It is also the location of the tone. While virtually any consonant can occur in the C1 position, there exist several restrictions on the kind of consonants that can occur in the C2 and C3 positions. In general, only liquid consonants may occur as C2 , while only nasals occur in the C3 position. Most verbs in Gbe languages have one of the basic syllable forms. Gbe nominals are generally preceded by a nominal prefix consisting of a vowel (cf. the Ewe word , 'tooth'). The quality of this vowel is restricted to the subset of non-nasal vowels. In some cases the nominal prefix is reduced to schwa or lost: the word for 'fire' is izo in Phelá, in Wací-Ewe and in Pecí-Ewe. The nominal prefix can be seen as a relic of a typical Niger–Congo noun class system. The Gbe languages are isolating languages, and as such express many semantic features by lexical items. Of a more agglutinative nature are the commonly used periphrastic constructions. In contrast to Bantu languages, a major branch of the Niger–Congo language family, Gbe languages have very little inflectional morphology. There is for example no subject–verb agreement whatsoever in Gbe, no gender agreement, and no inflection of nouns for number. The Gbe languages make extensive use of a rich system of tense/aspect markers. Reduplication is a morphological process in which the root or stem of a word, or part of it, is repeated. The Gbe languages, like most other Kwa languages, make extensive use of reduplication