Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The study of tone in African languages has played a significant role in the development of nonlinear phonology, since the independence of tone and other “segmental” features is most easily demonstrated in the domain of tone, and many African languages have rich systems of morphophonemic tonal alternations. Autosegmental phonology, as presented in Goldsmith (1976a), was motivated primarily by investigation of tonal problems in African languages, and as Yip, in chapter 13 of this volume observes, African languages have received most of the attention in theoretical studies of tone. While it is true that African tone systems are better understood today than they were twenty years ago, it is also true that the vast majority of the more than one thousand languages spoken in Africa are tonal, and are for all intents and purposes undescribed. Much work therefore remains to be done in understanding tone as it is represented in Africa. Drawing on earlier suprasegmental research in tone (Leben 1973; Williams 1976), Goldsmith (1976a) sets forth the theory of autosegmental phonology. The thesis advanced there is that certain feature groups, such as tone versus segmental features, define independent levels of representation (autosegments), and that there is not a one-to-one relationship between the number of tones and the number of segments in a string. One of the classical problems of tonology ... log in or subscribe to read full text