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CHAPTER 3
TONE
The majority of African languages have tonal systems, and Mono is no exception.
Mono has three contrastive level tones: High (H, marked with an acute accent above the
vowel), Mid (M, marked with a macron above the vowel), and Low (L, marked with a
grave accent). Rising and falling contour tones also exist in the language, but I analyze
them as sequences of level tones as discussed below.
Tone carries both lexical and grammatical function in Mono. In fact, tone bears
such a significant functional load in the Banda languages that several speech surrogates
have arisen. Sampson (1985: 143) reports whistle-talk in Tangbago. Arom & Cloarec-
Heiss (1976) report the use of talking drums in Linda. In Mono, I have observed the use
of xylophones for sending messages.
I discuss lexical tone in Section 3.1, grammatical tone in Section 3.2, and the
distribution of tone (including tonal melodies and tonal polarity) in Section 3.3.
3.1 Lexical tone
Lexical tone occurs on nouns, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, and grammatical
function words. In addition, there is some evidence that verbs have underlying lexical
tone, a point which will be discussed in Chapter 7. The following items provide evidence
of contrast between the three level tones in Mono and show at the same time the lexical
function of tone:
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