Melodic patterns

Another phenomenon which supports the autonomy of tones and segments is the phenomenon of melodic tonal restriction. In some languages, there are restrictions on the possible tones of words, irrespective of the number of vowels in the word. Mende is an example of such a language. Although this language has H, L, rising, falling, and rise–falling tones, the distribution of those tones in words is quite restricted. Words can be analyzed as falling into one of five tone melodies, illustrated in (30).

If tones were completely unrestricted, then given five surface tones, one would predict twenty-five patterns for bisyllabic words and 125 patterns for trisyllabic words. Instead, one finds five patterns no matter how many vowels there are.

This distribution can be explained if the restriction is simply stated at the level of the tonal representation: the tone pattern must be one of H, L, LH, HL or LHL. As seen in (31), given an autosegmental representation of tone, nìkílì, nyàhâ, and mba all have the same tonal representation.