Tone Systems

Abstract

This chapter presents tonal systems in all their variety, including relatively familiar and unfamiliar facets of tone. Among the parameters that can differ among languages with contrastive pitch levels are the number of phonological levels, the domain of tone features, the presence or absence of accentual properties, whether contour tones behave as single units or sequences of levels, and the presence of downstep and other register phenomena. Tone can undergo vertical or horizontal assimilation as well as dissimilation. Tone can function lexically, morphologically, syntactically, or semantically. No other phonological features exhibit the long-distance effects found with tone. Examples chosen from languages from around the world illustrate the variety of behaviours associated with linguistic tone and, to some extent, the types of analysis that have attempted to account for them.