Abstract
This paper presents a systematic account of the tone system of Penoles Mixtec (PM). While /H/ and /L/ tones are unambiguously needed in underlying representations, it is argued that the third tone is not /M/, but must rather be underspecified as /O/. Perhaps the most interesting of the several arguments presented is that strings of /O/ tone-bearing units are invisible to a process which deletes the second /L/ of a /L-O*-L/ sequence. We propose that all /L/ tones are underlying floating and that /L/ rather than /H/ is the marked tone in this three-value system. The surface mid and low-falling pitches in outputs are shown to derive by a small number of realizational rules, which also are responsible for producing successively upstepped H tones. The PM tone system is unusually interesting both from a general tonological perspective as well as for its relation to Durr’s (1987) Proto-Mixtec tones which have the inverted values in PM.
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