Beyond Time - Linguistics - University of California, Berkeley

Appendix C
Tone in Totela
This appendix offers preliminary findings from an ongoing study of Totela’s tone system,
which is typologically unusual in its system of high-tone anticipation (HTA) (see Hyman
2007b). It describes basic facts and tonal distributions, tonal processes such as high-tone
anticipation and Meeussen’s Rule, downstep, and grammatical tone patterns on verbs. The
question of downstep conditioning is particularly complex and is only treated briefly here.
Unlike in the main body of this dissertation, only H tones are marked. Underlining
indicates posited input H tones.
C.1 Basic facts
Totela has four surface (non-intonational) tones: H, ! H, L, HL (falling). H tones, apart from
intonational H%, do not occur on utterance-final syllables. Several H tones may appear in
a word, with downdrift – i.e. phonetic downstep, in which Hs in a series of Hs and Ls are
produced progressively lower – evident. An example of downdrift may be seen in figure C.1,
which shows a spectrogram and pitch trace for máyiwíye ‘bird (sp.)’, which has the surface
tone pattern H-L-H-L.
369