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 January 2017
Preliminary draft for Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics

Autosegmental Phonology
William R. Leben
Stanford Univeristy

Summary
Autosegments were introduced by John Goldsmith in his 1976 M.I.T. dissertation to represent
tone and other suprasegmental phenomena. Goldsmith’s intuition, embodied in the term he
created, was that autosegments constituted an independent, conceptually equal tier of
phonological representation, with both tiers realized simultaneously like the separate voices in
a musical score.

The analysis of suprasegmentals came late to generative phonology, even though it had been
tackled in American structuralism with the long components of Harris 1944 and despite being
a particular focus of Firthian prosodic analysis (Firth 1948). The standard version of
generative phonology of the era (Chomsky and Halle’s The Sound Pattern of English) made
no special provision for phenomena that had been labeled suprasegmental or prosodic by
earlier traditions.

An early sign that tones required a separate tier of representation was the phenomenon of
tonal stability. In many tone languages, when vowels are lost historically or synchronically,
their tones remain. The behavior of contour tones in many languages is also falls into place
when the contours are broken down into sequences of level tones on an independent level or
representation. The autosegmental framework captured this naturally, since a sequence of
elements on one tier can be connected to a single element on another. But the single most
compelling aspect of the early autosegmental model was a natural account of tone spreading, a
very common process that was only awkwardly captured by rules of whatever sort.
Goldsmith’s autosegmental solution was the Well-Formedness Condition, requiring, among
other things, that every tone on the tonal tier be associated with some segment on the
segmental tier, and vice-versa. Tones thus spread more or less automatically to segments
lacking them. The Well-Formedness Condition, at the very core of the autosegmental
framework was a rare constraint, posited nearly two decades before optimality theory.

One-to-many associations and spreading onto adjacent elements are characteristic of tone but
not confined to it. Similar behaviors are widespread in long-distance phenomena including
intonation, vowel harmony, and nasal prosodies, as well as more locally with partial or full
assimilation across adjacent segments.

The early autosegmental notion of tiers of representation that were distinct but conceptually
equal soon gave way to a model with one basic tier connected to tiers for particular kinds of
articulation, including tone and intonation, nasality, vowel features, and others. This has led to
hierarchical representations of phonological features in current models of feature geometry,
replacing the unordered distinctive feature matrices of early generative phonology.
Autosegmental representations and processes also provide a means of representing non-
 2
concatenative morphology, notably the complex interweaving of roots and patterns in Semitic
languages.

Later work modified many of the key properties of the autosegmental model. Optimality
Theory has led to a radical rethinking of autosegmental mapping, delinking, and spreading as
they were formulated under the earlier derivational paradigm.

KEYWORDS: non-linear phonology, tone, OCP, Obligatory Contour Principle,

suprasegmentals, autosegment

1. Origins
Autosegments, introduced by John Goldsmith in his 1976 M.I.T. dissertation, are designed
around the distinct characteristics of tone and other suprasegmental phenomena. Goldsmith’s
intuition, embodied in the term he created, was that autosegments constitute an independent,
conceptually equal tier of phonological representation, with both tiers realized simultaneously
like the separate voices in a musical score.

Suprasegmentals—phonological features stretching over spans longer than a single segment--

had been addressed in American structuralism with the long components of Harris 1944 and
were a particular focus of prosodic analysis by Firth and his followers (Firth 1948, Robins
1957). The standard version of generative phonology of the era (Chomsky and Halle’s The
Sound Pattern of English), despite all the attention it paid to stress--made no special provision
for suprasegmental features spanning multiple segments.

This enormous gap was filled, with utterly revolutionary results, by autosegmental phonology,
whose roots Goldsmith 1990: 3-4, 8 and Goldsmith and Laks 2010: 17 trace to Bloch, Harris,
and Hockett. Another frequently cited precedent the prosodic analysis of Firth and the London
school.1 Goldsmith 1992:154, reviewing work that foreshadowed autosegmental phonology,
how and why his framework is different:

But tone is not like nasalization, even when the nasalization is as grammaticized as
BendorSamuel showed that it is in Terena, where the first-person singular is marked
by a prosody of nasalization (Bendor-Samuel, 1960). For in tone systems, it is
necessary to come to grips with a kind of internal segmentation within the tonal
melody or envelope. As we have come to see in the last ten or fifteen years, this
autonomous segmentation of tone, and other prosodic levels, is an important
characteristic of African tone systems, and autosegmental analyses specifically differ
from their Firthian counterparts in insisting on segmentation of a uniform sort on each
tier. Indeed, this is the central idea of autosegmental phonology: that the effects
impressionistically called 'suprasegmental' are still just as SEGMENTAL as anything
else, in the sense that they consist of linear sequences of more basic units which can
be treated analytically,

Thus, tones occur in “melodies” or “envelopes” analyzable into linear sequences of smaller

1
Goldsmith 1992:154 concurs, with one reservation: “The Firthian approach encouraged investigators to notice
respects in which a tone pattern was a property of an entire word,” though he finds Firthian treatments of tone, at
least in African languages, “a good deal less insightful than its treatment of other prosodic effects.” His reasons
for that judgment, it turns out, also express the essence of the autosegmental concept, as described in the running
text of the present article.
 3
units, not unlike what happens with the phonological segments of a continuous phonetic
signal. Contour tones like rise and fall, for example, normally are made of linear sequences of
contrastive tone levels. 2 A phonologically falling tone can often be seen to consist of a High
tone followed by a Low tone, and similarly for rising tones, a rise-fall, and so on. An example
from Welmers 1959 is Mandingo, a Mande language of Guinea, where the falling tone
(represented in (1) by HL with a ligature over it) on the final syllable of a noun in the definite
comes from suffixing a Low tone (representing the definite marker in toto) to a noun):

(1) yiri ‘the tree’ = yiri ‘tree’ + Def.

[ H HL ] [HH ] [ L ]

Bird 1966 called this a “floating tone” in closely related Bambara, a Mande language of Mali,
and many works of this era uncovered similar cases in other languages. Examples—including
floating tones as distinct phonemes but not necessarily morphemes--are Spears 1967,
Voorhoeve 1971, and Hyman 1972. How were floating tones to be represented? Using the
version of generative phonology of that time, some researchers cast the tones as features on
ghost segments, represented formally either as [+segment] (as in Schachter and Fromkin
1968) or as [-segment] (as in Maddieson 1971. In either case, the ghost segments carried a
tone feature but no other articulatory features.

Leben 1973 argued that such ghost segments represented attempts to squeeze tonal
phenomena into a segmental framework ill-suited to handle them. The reasoning was that
other facts showed tones to be inherently independent of segments—for instance, the very
common case where a vowel or whole syllable is deleted (historically or synchronically) yet
its tones remain. Another sign of phonological independence between tones and their assigned
tone-bearing units (TBUs) involves the distribution of tone “melodies” in many African tone
systems. For example, Mandingo and Bambara have two underlying tone patterns, H and L 3
Unlike the canonical tone language in which every syllable is specified for distinctive tone,
independently of surrounding syllables, in these languages, the number of tonal patterns is the
same no matter how many syllables a lexeme has. 4 More controversially, Leben 1973 has
cited Mende, where each of the five regular tonal melodies L, H, HL, LH, and LHL can be all
found on nouns of one, two, and three syllables. The Mende analysis has been challenged, e.g.
by Dwyer 1978, Conteh et al. 1983, and Shih and Inkelas 2016, but a highly similar and less
contested case is Teke-Kukuya, a Bantu language of the Republic of the Congo, as described
by Hyman 1987, drawing on Paulian 1984.

Facts like these led Leben to propose expanding phonological representations to express
certain phonological features (at least tone and nasality) on domains larger than the segment—
the syllable or the morpheme, at the very least. Following a vein similar to McCawley 1970a,
Leben also proposed that at some point in the phonological derivation, syllable or morpheme

2
Contour tones do not behave uniformly across languages. Yip 1989 and Bao 1999 survey the facts and offer
analyses.
3
or H and LH: see Green 2010 for discussion.
4
This is the canonical pitch accent system, as defined by McCawley 1978.
 4
tones would be mapped onto segments. A sample mapping procedure from Williams 1976
[1971] would map tones onto vowels from left to right, one per syllable.

In another case that antedates autosegments, Anderson 1974, 1976 noted the challenge posed
for SPE-type segments by complex articulations. The cases he mentioned, involving nasality,
aspiration and intrusive stops, function as single segments yet include a sequence of
articulations, as with contour tones above. Examples are prenasalized, postnasalized and
‘medio-nasalized’ stops. 5

(2) a. prenasalized b. postnasalized c. ‘medio-nasalized’

consonant [mb] consonant [ bm] consonant [mbm]
C C C
[+nas] [–nas] [–nas] [+nas] [–nas] [+nas] [–nas]

2. The autosegmental framework

The core insight behind this framework is the relative independence of certain phonological
feature bundles from others. Taking tone as the starting point, it occupies a separate tier of
representation from the segmental tier. The two tiers may be totally independent underlyingly
but in the course of a phonological derivation, elements of one tier are linked to elements of the
other. Linking is carried out by a general convention, the Well-Formedness Condition,
supplemented by language-particular rules. Goldsmith’s (1976: 27) version of the Well-
Formedness Condition links autosegmental tones with vowels as in (3), leaving aside later
adjustments:
(3) Well-Formedness Condition (WFC) 1
a. All vowels are associated with at least one tone; all tones are associated with
at least one vowel.
b. Association lines do not cross.

Language-specific rules can adjust the links prescribed by the WFC.

A major advantage of the autosegmental framework was its ability to capture one-to-many
relationships between tones and tone-bearing units. The familiar case of tone spreading
(Hyman and Schuh 1974), in which a toneless syllable is assigned the tone of an adjacent
syllable, creates a one-to-many relationship between a tone and a set of tone-bearing units.
Following Goldsmith, rightward tone spreading consists in the change from (4a) to (4b) and is
schematized as in (5).

(4)
a. x x b. x x
T T

5
‘Medio-nasalized’ stops are derived from prenasalized stops between vowels in Kaingáng, a language of Brazil
(Wiesemann 1972).
 5
(5) x x

For the complex segments in (1), autosegmental representations as early as Rivas 1974,
1975 turned to representing related cases as single consonants associated with
sequences of autosegments with contrasting values for the feature [nasal]. It is easy to
see parallels with other segments that phonology treats as single units even though
they consist of a sequence of articulations, and the two-tiered approach soon spread to
affricates, which SPE had analyzed with the implicit sequence feature [delayed
release].

3. Extensions of the autosegmental model.

The autosegmental model’s impact on generative phonology was immediate,

widespread, and lasting, leading within a decade to major revisions of theories of
stress prominence, syllable structure and the organization of distinctive features.
Liberman’s 1975 dissertation used a variety of English intonation contours to motivate
metrical formalisms for mapping autosegmental intonational melodies—first broached by
Goldsmith 1974--onto text. Kahn’s 1976 dissertation explored the consequences of expressing
the syllable as an autosegmental unit, with segments assigned to syllables by autosegmental
association lines. Up to that time, syllable constituency had been represented through the
placement of syllable boundaries among a linear string of segments. Kahn argued that the
many-to-one associations typical of autosegmental phonology predicted the possibility of the
ambisyllabic segment, a single segment simultaneously belonging to two adjacent syllables.
This insight led to even more highly structured approaches to the syllable, including CV
phonology and moraic phonology, as described below.

By applying autosegmental notions to vowel harmony in Akan, Clements 1977 accounted for
some of the defining properties of vowel harmony. These included the one-to-many
relationship between a phonological feature and the feature-bearing units of a phonological
string and the tendency of such a feature to spread automatically to neighboring segments
unspecified for that feature. Anderson 1980 and Goldsmith 1985, among many others,
continued in this general direction, extending the autosegmental analysis to other languages.
This work would eventually lead to a theory of feature geometry assigning structure to what
had been ‘bundles’ of unordered distinctive features in the SPE theory. The structure was a
hierarchical arrangement into groups, reflecting ways in which one feature set affects others.
In effect, as McCarthy 1988: 89 noted, feature geometry ‘constitutes a model of the
phonologically relevant characteristics of the human vocal tract.’ We return to feature
geometry in section 6.

For general surveys of this period, see Anderson 1985, Goldsmith 1990, Goldsmith
and Noske 2006, and Leben 2011. Surveys of autosegmental theories of tone, accent,
and intonation appear in Yip 2002, Gussenhoven 2004, and Ladd 2008.

4. Templatic morphology.
Multiple tiers were also extended to the realm of morphology with McCarthy’s (1979,
1981) templatic analysis of Arabic. Among McCarthy’s innovations was a CV tier,
which in turn had consequences for autosegmental processes in phonology. In the
example below, the triliteral root /ktb/ ‘read’ combines with the vowel patterns /a/
 6
and /ui/ to form the perfective active stem /katab/ and the perfective passive stem
/kutib/.

(6)
a. μ b. μ

k t b k t b

CVCVC CVCVC

a u i

μ μ

The morpheme node μ at the top of (6a, b) is linked to the phonological material of
root /ktb/, which, as consonants, are linked to C nodes below, shorthand for syllabic].
At the bottom of (6a, b) is another morpheme node μ linked to the respective
perfective active and perfective passive forms /a/ and /ui/. In templatic morphology
Cs and Vs are the analog of the TBUs in autosegmental representations of tone.

More complicated examples led to debates over the principles for mapping /ktb/, /a/,
and /ui/ onto their respective positions on the CV tier, leading Yip 1988: 571 to
propose Edge-In Association:
(7) Edge-In Association (Yip 1988: 571)
a. Anchoring. Associate the outermost melodic elements to the outermost
skeletal slots, one-to-one.
b. Filling. Associate the remaining melodic elements and the remaining slots in
the same way.
c. Template satisfaction. (Language-specific adjustments)

Yip goes on to mention tonal cases where (16) would be an improvement over left-to-
right mapping, while allowing for the possibility that mapping tones onto TBUs is
governed by different principles from these (see also Archangeli and Pulleyblank 1994;
Zoll 1997, 2003). Back in templatic morphology, Buckley (1990) shows that edge-in
association predicts the correct mapping of Tigrinya roots onto noun and verb
templates, for example in the key case of mapping triliteral roots onto the quadrilateral
plural template, where other approaches fail.

5. CV Phonology
The original CV skeleton proposed by McCarthy (1979 was pursued further by
Clements and Keyser 1980, who regarded the C’s and V’s a phonological “timing
units.” But a more fundamental unit of phonological length is the mora, an abstract
unit that distinguishes short syllables or vowels from long ones by mora count: one
for short and two for long: Hyman 1985, and McCarthy and Prince 1990, 2001 [1993]
evaluate a variety of suggestions for moraic structure and include many additional
references. The basic contribution of moraic theory is captured in this quote from
Hayes 1989: 254, based on an early version of McCarthy and Prince 2001 [1993]:
“Moraic theory is not a segmental theory, as there is no level at which segment count
is depicted. McCarthy and Prince take this as an advantage of the theory, in that
 7
there are no known phonological processes that count segments, although many
processes count moras or syllables.”

The mora is the lowest unit on the prosodic hierarchy (Selkirk 1980, Nespor and
Vogel 1986, McCarthy and Prince 2001 [1993]).:

(8) Prosodic hierarchy

Prosodic Word
|
Metrical foot
|
σ
|
µ

Here from McCarthy and Prince 1995 is one standard representation for the syllable
/pa:/ showing the place of moraic structure:

(9) σ
/\
µ µ
\/
p a

Broselow 1995 examines some alternative treatments for mora-based and syllable-
based process.

6. Feature Geometry

Feature spreading is not confined to tone, nasality, and vowel harmony. All
phonological features can condition and undergo assimilations. Further, as shown by
Goldsmith’s 1981 account of the reduction from /s/ to /h/ in dialects of Spanish, a
floating autosegment—previously found with tones and nasality--could be a
laryngeal articulation not linked to any supraglottal one. Facts like these raised the
possibility that phonological features in general are represented on autosegmental
tiers. This idea was developed in great detail by Clements 1985, who also noted that
distinctive features grouped into neat classes, including place, manner and
supralaryngeal, which could be naturally represented by branching tree structures
with phonological features as terminal nodes dominated by nodes representing
feature classes. Subclasses like place and manner could in turn be dominated by
other classes, like supralaryngeal. As outlined by Clements and by Sagey 1986, each
feature is an autosegmental tier, grouped together with related features under a class
node and ultimately with other class nodes under a root node.

Geometrical representations of the various features and their groupings into related
sets are entertained by Sagey 1986, McCarthy 1988, Odden 1991, Clements and Hume
1995, Halle 1995, and Rubach 2007. Steriade 1993 and Padgett 1994 augment the
model with higher-level constituents for some consonants.
 8

(10) (a) Consonants (b) Vocoids

oral cavity vocalic

[consonantal] aperture
C-place V-place
…

[labial] [labial]
[coronal] [coronal]

[dorsal] [dorsal]

7. Refinements.

Autosegmental phonology gave a boost to tonal studies, bringing new data and
analytic insights to the division of labor between tonal universals and language-
particular tone rules. For example, initial tone mapping did not always follow
Williams’ 1976 [1971] precedent of applying from left to right, with one tone per TBU.
Clements and Ford (1979) required an initial tone assignment rule for Kikuyu
assigning the leftmost tone to the second TBU on the left. Zoll 1997, 2003 found cases
in which the most straightforward procedure first mapped the leftmost and the
rightmost tones to the TBUs at the corresponding edges. In languages with
underlying accents (typically designated by an asterisk (*) in autosegmental work),
the first assigned links were between tones and TBUs with matching asterisks
(Goldsmith 1976 for English, Haraguchi 1975 for Japanese).
Languages were also found to differ in how they treated leftover tones and TBUs
once the initial assignments were made. Where the WFC called for automatic
spreading of tones to unlinked TBUs and of TBUs to unlinked tones, Pulleyblank
1986 observed thee distinct situations for unlinked TBUs:

(11) Options for spreading tones to unlinked TBUs

a. Some languages don’t allow spreading at all.
b. Others spread tone only to a single adjacent TBU.
c. Still others apply spreading to an unbounded sequence of TBUs.

One development that helped to account for these differences across languages was
underspecification theory,6 which applied a default feature value to any feature-
bearing unit as yet unspecified for a value of that feature. By the original WFC,
features automatically spread to toneless TBUs. But Pulleyblank observed that often
spreading was not automatic and TBUs instead were assigned their default feature
value by Default Tone Insertion. This led Pulleyblank to reformulate the mapping
rules and the WFC approximately as in (12) and (13), leaving out minor
complications:

6
Kiparsky 1982, Archangeli I984, Goldsmith & Noske 2006
 9

(12) Association conventions (Pulleyblank 1986)

Map a sequence of tones onto a sequence of tone-bearing units,

a. from left to right;
b. in a one-to-one relation.

(13) Well-Formedness Condition (Pulleyblank 1986)

Association lines do not cross.

If tones spread—whether to one TBU or to several—this was done with language-

particular rules. Any leftover toneless TBUs would receive a tone by Default Tone
Insertion.

8. The OCP
One to many and many to one relationships between tiers of representation make it possible to
express a contrast between (14a, b):

(14)
a. x x
\/
T

b. x x
| |
T T

There are a number of ways that autosegmental theory could handle this difference. Leben
1973, arguing to represent tone on a tier of its own, divorced from segments, seized on the
independent tonal melody as one of the prime innovations of the new approach. The strongest
possible claim was that melodies were constrained to be expressed only with sequences of
unlike tones: HLH was in, HHL was out. Otherwise, the separate-tier approach was too
similar to the strictly segmental approach Leben was proposing to replace. In Tiv, for
example, McCawley 1970b had shown that tone patterns in the different verb tenses could be
expressed by formulas like those in (15), where B is the lexical tone of a verb (High for some,
Low for others), a zero subscript after a tone indicates as many copies of that tone as needed
to fill the available TBUs of the verb, and the ligature groups two tones onto one TBU:

(15) Tiv verb (McCawley 1970b)

Continuous: H L o

General Past LB L o

Past Habitual LB H o H L
 10
Formulas like these were easy to express in a segment-based approach like McCawley‘s, but
if they were absolutely required, this would weaken the case for a new approach. Barring HH
and LL from melodies would reinforce the new and interesting claim that underlying tonal
melodies were independent of the nature and number of segments in their morphemic domain.
Thus, Leben devoted a chapter to translating McCawley’s Tiv formulas into a system
disallowing like tone sequences in melodies.

Goldsmith 1976 saw things differently. Assigning the label “Obligatory Contour Principle” to
the restriction against adjacent like tones in a tonal melody, Goldsmith (p. 164) proposed that
this was tenable at the phonetic level, where as a result of mapping, spreading, and whatever
other rules, the different autosegmental tiers are linked to one another. He added that the
unmarked case would be one where the underlying representation would reflect the phonetics-
--what later under OT would be termed faithfulness. Thus, in the unmarked case, phonological
representations would respect the OCP, but this could not be an absolute requirement, since
faithfulness between phonetic and phonological is often violated.

Leben and Goldsmith based their conceptions of the OCP on theoretical reasoning. Odden
1986 stepped in to argue that the contrast in (14) between singly and multiply-linked tones is
actually a useful one empirically, since this contrast is attested in languages—and indeed is
present even in a single language. He analyzes Shambaa, a Bantu language of Tanzania, as
having two types of High-toned sequence: one type that surfaces as level High, as in (16a) and
another surfacing with a downstepping 7 pattern, as in (16b):
(16) Shambaa (Odden 1986, 1995)
a. /njoka/ ‘snake’ b. /ngoto/ ‘sheep’

H HH

Surface patterns
njóká ngó‘tó
[ – – ] [ –– ]

Subsequent work in Optimality Theory, beginning with Myers (1997), has gotten considerable
mileage from regarding the OCP a violable constraint – reasonably enough, perhaps, since
most constraints can be violated. Bickmore 1999 adds the possibility of different rankings for
the OCP in different parts or levels of the morphology of a given language.

The OCP was first conceived as a constraint on tonal melodies, but as the reach of
autosegmental phonology broadened to encompass much of what had earlier been construed
as segmental phonology, possible OCP effects have been investigated very broadly across
phonological phenomena—so broadly that no truly comprehensive survey exists, though
Frisch et al. 2004, whose main focus is OCP effects in morphology, also cover some past
work on the OCP in phonology and relate this topic to gradient constraints.

It is still an open question whether the OCP for tone is the same constraint as the OCP applied
to other features. McCarthy’s 1986 suggestion to attribute Arabic antigemination to the OCP
met with retorts from Odden 1988 and Goldsmith 1990.

7
Tonal downstep is a downward shift in tonal register; see Clements 1979, Hyman 1979, Clements and
Goldsmith 1980, and Connell 2011.
 11

9. Autosegmental phonology and constraint-based theories.

Over the last two decades, constraint-based approaches have dominated generative
phonological theory. This raises some question about autosegmental phonology. The question
does not arise because of any inherent lack of coherence between constraint-based phonology
and the autosegmental architecture. Indeed even the earliest version of autosegmental
phonology made key use of the Well-Formedness Condition, which is itself nothing but an set
of constraints. What OT-based autosegments must face is the need to reinterpret linking,
delinking, and spreading, which of course were all initially conceived as operations. But even
the earliest OT-based work on tone--Myers 1997 and Zoll 2003—found ways to recast linking
and spreading in terms of constraints banning empty TBU slots and floating tones and using
markedness, faithfulness, and alignment constraints to determine which tones were optimally
matched with which TBUs. At the moment, the real problem, exacerbated by the relatively
open field of possible constraints to choose from, is coming up well-motivated choices. See
Wilson 2003, 2004, 2006 and McCarthy 2010 for more recent solutions to the problem.

The autosegmental framework has a certain graphic appeal: we easily see links between one
tier and the next along with any unlinked material. But the links simply express the domains
over which a given feature extends, and so one could easily draw a different picture of an
autosegmental relationship, for example (17c, d) as respective alternatives to (17a,b).

(17) a. xxx b. xxx

\| / \/ |
H HH

c. H[ xxx] d. H [xx]H[x}

(17c, d) are harder to read, but what they would potentially say about the linking
between tones and TBUs is the same as the corresponding structures in (17a, b). In
contrast to this, at least constraint-based approaches have come up with different
views of how tones relate to TBUs that differ from (17a, b) substantively as well as
graphically.

The first of these is Optimal Domains Theory (Cassimjee 1998, Cassimjee and Kisseberth
1998, and Cassimjee and Kisseberth 2001). For decades, at least since McCawley 1974,
globality has been a concern in certain tonal systems, primarily in Bantu; see also Hyman
1982, Hyman and Katamba 2010. Optimal Domains Theory was specifically designed to build
global reference directly into phonological representations, as shown here:
 12

(18)
a. ODT representation (spreading case)
x ( x́ x́ x́ ) x

b. ODT representation (shifting case)

x ( x x x́ ) x

To interpret the representations in (18), compare the corresponding standard

autosegmental structures:

(19)

In (19a) a linked tone spreads to the two TBU’s on its right, while in (19b), the linked tone,
after spreading to the two TBUs on its right, is delinked from all but the rightmost position.
Both operations are widely attested in tone languages. What’s interesting is that in the
Southern Bantu languages that Cassimjee and Kisseberth describe, it is important to know for
a given surface tonal configuration like the ones on the right side of the arrow in (19a) and
(19b) directly above what their underlying source was.

That information is directly built into the ODT structures in (18a, b). The underline on the
first x in the parenthesized expression ( x́ x́ x́ ) of (a) indicates that this x was underlying
High-toned, while the acute accents on each x in the same expression indicates the surface
tones. The underlying source of the High tone in (18a, b) is the regarded as head of the span.
The parentheses enclosing this group are the equivalent of multiple linking in autosegmental
representations: all three High-toned x’s are, in effect, linked to a single H. 8 Thus the ODT
representation (8a) conflates the derivational sequence in (9a) into a single structure. The
same is true of the corresponding representations in (8b) and (9b).

McCarthy 2004 similarly assigns heads to autosegmental spans. As in ODT, a span is an

exhaustive string of adjacent feature-bearing units with the same value for a distinctive
feature. For example, the three-TBU sequences associated with H in this representation:

8
However, Cassimjee & Kisseberth 1998: 56 point out that in ODT single vs. multiple linking of autosegments
plays “no role whatever.” They do not address the reasons for this position or its consequences.
 13

(20)

counts as a span and would need to be marked either left-headed or right-headed, just as with
metrical feet or other prosodic units. The advantage, according to McCarthy, is that this would
make it possible to account for directionality effects in non-rule-based frameworks by means
of constraints on location of the head segment of a span. See McCarthy 2004: 11-12 and Key
2008 for examples. Key’s Bantu example covers some of the same phenomena as ODT.
Downing 2011 presents a general survey of Bantu tone. One remaining question for the
headed span approach, attributed by McCarthy to Lee Bickmore, is the status of floating
features. Cassimjee & Kisseberth 1998: 60 also note the absence of floating features from
ODT. Their analysis may not require floating tones in Bantu, but the general applicability of
this approach across languages remains to be investigated.

ODT and headed spans are both variants of autosegmental phonology. A more radical, non-
autosegmental approach is Q Theory (Inkelas and Shih 2013, Shih and Inkelas.2013, and Shih
and Inkelas 2014). Q Theory divides each segment into three quanta. Thus, a single TBU
consists of a quantized sequence a 1 a 2 a 3 , enough elements to accommodate the members of a
three-tone contour. This approach, they argue, captures both the unity of contours and the
separability of the individual components. Further, using Agreement by Correspondence
(Hansson 2001, Rose and Walker 2004), they can account naturally for consonant-tone
interactions and possibly also vowel harmony and autosegmental spreading. 9 Linear
representations will still need to deal with the rich set of contrasts that previous analyses
expressed through autosegmental geometry. That includes structurally different types of
contour tones (Yip 1989, Bao 1999), singly- vs. multiply-linked tones, and floating tones.

9 But see Steriade 2014 for alternatives.

 14
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FURTHER READING

Anderson, Stephen R. 1985. Phonology in the twentieth century: Theories of rules and
theories of representations. University of Chicago Press, 1985.

Goldsmith, John. 1990. Autosegmental and metrical phonology. Blackwell, 1990.

Goldsmith, John, and Bernard Laks. 2012. Generative phonology: Its origins, its principles,
and its successors. The Cambridge History of Linguistics, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press. Online: http://hum.uchicago.edu/~jagoldsm/Papers/GenerativePhonology.pdf

Goldsmith, John., and Manuela Noske. 2006. Autosegmental phonology and

underspecification theory. In History of the Language Sciences, edited by S. Auroux, K.
Koerner, H.-J. Niederehe, and K. Versteegh. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

Yip, Moira. 2002. Tone. Cambridge textbooks in linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

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