Abstract
This chapter discusses the representation of tone using three languages— Etsako, Mende, and Hausa. It presents arguments that support the phonological independence of tones from segments such as the facts that (1) when a syllable is lost, its tone can linger on and (2) just as tone languages can have toneless morphemes, with just a segmental composition, they can have segmentless morphemes, with a purely tonal composition. The chapter presents the argument that Etsako has rules which affect tone with no regard for the number or type of syllables in their domain; rules that apply to L apply to LL as well; this result has been reinforced by considering the past negative form of the Mende verb in which a level L is assigned to verbs before the ending -ni if the phonological tone pattern of the verb is L, H, or LH, but not if it is HL or LHL. The reason for this is that a suprasegmental deletion rule eliminates a final H in this construction without affecting any other tones.
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