Tone

This unit investigates tone, a term that refers to pitch when it is used contrastively to distinguish one word from another. In tonal languages, words can have different tones and tones can display co-occurrence restrictions. Moreover, just as morpheme concatenation can trigger segmental alternations, tones may alternate as well. This unit examines both tonal distribution and tonal alternation. It has four chapters. Chapter 13 considers tonal distribution data from Mende nouns and shows that only sixteen out of the eighty-four tone sequences are attested. This chapter presents two analyses of Mende tone distribution. One analysis views tone as a property of segments. This Segmental Theory of tone is juxtaposed with Autosegmental Theory, which sees tone as “independent” of segments. In Chapter 14, Segmental Theory and Autosegmental Theory are tested against related tonal alternation in Mende. These comparisons not only introduce these theories but also highlight their respective strengths and limitations. Chapters 15 and 16 examine tonal alternations that result from vowel contact in Yoruba. This examination reveals that out of the three tones – high, mid, and low – in Yoruba, the mid tone is most likely to lose out when they come in contact. This tone asymmetry provides the testing ground for three approaches to asymmetry: Contrastive Specification and Radical Underspecification in Chapter 15 and Optimality Theory in Chapter 16. Together, the four chapters of this unit introduce tone as a phenomenon, familiarize you with some of its key patterns and properties, illustrate how tonal patterns are identified, and demonstrate how they are handled by both pre-OT and OT approaches.