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Tone-tune association in Tommo So (Dogon) folk songs

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2026

Laura McPherson  and
Kevin M. Ryan
Laura McPherson*
Affiliation:
Dartmouth College
Kevin M. Ryan*
Affiliation:
Harvard University
*
15 N. College St. HB 6220 Dartmouth College Hanover, NH 03755, [laura.emcpherson@gmail.com]
Boylston Hall 317 Harvard University Cambridge, MA 02138, [kevinryan@fas.harvard.edu]
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Abstract

This article explores the relationship between linguistic tone and musical melody in Tommo So, a Dogon language of Mali. Most fundamentally, contrary mappings (rising tone on falling music, or vice versa) are strongly penalized, while oblique mappings (flat tone on changing music, or vice versa) are largely tolerated. Strictness of mapping is further modulated by several factors, including whether the tones straddle a word boundary, whether their source is lexical or grammatical, what the position is in the line, and so forth. We model these conditions using weighted, stringent constraints and conclude that tone-tune setting bears more in common with metrics than previously recognized, setting the groundwork for a more general theory of phonological mapping across modalities.

Keywords

phonologytonetextsettingmetricsmusicharmonic grammar

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 94 , Issue 1 , March 2018 , pp. 119 - 156
Copyright
Copyright © 2018 Linguistic Society of America

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Footnotes

*

We would like to thank Megan Crowhurst, Morgan Sonderegger, and an anonymous Language referee for helpful feedback on this article, in addition to audiences at UCLA, UC San Diego, UC Berkeley, LSA 2014, and AMP 2016 for valuable discussions in earlier stages of this work. The first author gratefully acknowledges Jeffrey Heath and the financial support of NSF grant BCS-0853364 in carrying out the fieldwork for this article. Finally, we are indebted to our consultants and singers for sharing their culture, language, and music with us. All music and lyrics remain the intellectual property of Tepama Ouologuem, Roukiatou Djeboukile, and Kounjay Ouologuem.

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