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Thus, I interpret a contour tone to be a sequence of two distinct level tones. The
question which arises is whether to consider the vowel associated with these tones to be a
single vowel or a geminate. In tautomorphemic environments, there is evidence that it
should be considered a single vowel. In the stative aspect and certainty mood, a single
reduplicated vowel receives two tonal specifications. This will be discussed further in the
next section. The independence of the number of tones and the number of vowels was
observed as early as Pike & Pike (1947: 82), who note this phenomenon in Mazateco.
Mono and Mazateco differ in one major respect, however. In Mono, if two tones occur on
a single vowel, the vowel is phonetically long, whereas in Mazateco, the length of the
vowel remains nearly constant. In moraic theory, tautomorphemic contour tones in Mono
are represented as in (6):
(6) H L
| |
µ µ
\ /
=
Heteromorphemic cases such as in (4a) above clearly involve two distinct vowels.
Those can be represented as follows:
(7) H L
| |
µ µ
| |
= =
In both cases, I transcribe a contour tone as a sequence of two distinct level tones
over adjacent identical vowels, e.g. =(= =(= = [=V]. I have done this for the sake of ease of
transcription, but the reader should keep in mind that this represents the two different
configurations in (6) and (7).
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