Introduction

By and large up until now I have emphasized the independence of tone from the rest of the phonology, with the major exception of its interaction with laryngeal features, especially voicing. However, tone bears a close relation to stress, and to intonation, and this interaction is the topic of this chapter. Tonal features can enter the phonology from a number of sources. Here there is a real difference of degree between tonal and segmental features, with segmental features being (almost) entirely associated with lexical items, rather than such things as prosodic heads, phonological phrases, or declarative intonation. Imagine what a language would sound like if the right edge of every phonological phrase ended in a voiced uvular fricative – we would have something very like the comedian Victor Borge's famous ‘Phonetic Punctuation’, where all commas are pronounced with a sort of gargle!

In tone languages, although the obvious source is lexical tone, it is by no means the only source. The overall picture that emerges is that the tonal phonology must accept not only input direct from the lexicon, but also from insertion during the lexical phonology, and from the utterance after lexical insertion. At this stage in addition to lexical items the representation may include certain abstract markers such as [FOCUS] and also syntactic structure, which in turn influences prosodic structure. The lexical entries that contain tones include not only the traditional lexical items such as nouns, verbs, roots, and affixes, but also functional elements and operators such as [WH], [FOCUS], [TENSE], prosodic phrases such as Phonological Phrase or Intonational Phrase, and pragmatic tunes such as Declarative.