SOAS Research Online

Abstract

The tonal phonemes which occur in utterances containing only one sentence are (i) high tone, (ii) downstep between successive high tones, and (iii) a slight rise towards the end of a prepausal high tone. The phonemic status of the second and third of these is very largely accounted for by low tones becoming high in agreement with adjacent high tones; downstep is basically an automatic feature of the second of two high tones which are separated by one or more low tones, but if a low tone between two high tones becomes high in tonal aagreement with the preceding or following high the downstep remains, occurring between the agreeing high and the high with which it is not in agreement. The slight rise towards the end of a prepausal high tone is basically an automatic feature of a high tone which is in pause and is borne by a tone-bearing unit without a final glottal stop, but if a low tone becomes high in pause in agreement with the preceding high it does not have the slight rise. The remaining occurrences of downstep and non- occurrences of the slight rise can be accounted for by the postulation of zero tone-bearing units with low or high tone (which mostly turn out to correspond to non-zero tone-bearing units in other dialects or languages). The glottal stop is an accentual rather than a consonantal phoneme. It sometimes represents a separate morpheme which might reasonably be looked upon as a morpheme of intonation, but apart from that it is basically an automatic feature of a tone-bearing unit of the pattern consonant-vowel-consonant which is in pause.