ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with a conspicuous phonological type of segment, tones. It shows that how tone in African languages gave rise to the autosegmental model of phonological representation and the main constraints that govern those representations, like the No Crossing Constraint, the Twin Sister Convention, the No Crowding Constraint and the Obligatory Contour Principle (OCP), as well as association algorithms like the Association Convention. Tones, whether lexical or postlexical, have a location and phonological content. The location of the tones in an Etung word is described in terms of the Association Convention, while their phonological content is described in terms of a word melody. The chapter draws attention to the privative nature of tone oppositions and the way tone systems may be shaped by the perturbations of f0 caused by consonantal articulations. It outlines the description of the pronunciation of tones follows the target-and-interpolation model.
