Tone-tune association in Tommo So (Dogon) folk songs

This article explores the relationship between linguistic tone and musical melody in Tommo So, a Dogon language of Mali. Most fundamentally, contrary mappings (rising tone on falling music, or vice versa) are strongly penalized, while oblique mappings (flat tone on changing music, or vice versa) are largely tolerated. Strictness of mapping is further modulated by several factors, including whether the tones straddle a word boundary, whether their source is lexical or grammatical, what the position is in the line, and so forth. We model these conditions using weighted, stringent constraints and conclude that tone-tune setting bears more in common with metrics than previously recognized, setting the groundwork for a more general theory of phonological mapping across modalities.