Partial Tone Polarity and Tonal Feature Decomposition in Sopvoma (Mao)

This paper documents and analyses a previously undescribed tonal pattern in the endangered Tibeto-Burman language Sopvoma (Mao). Sopvoma employs four level tones in its lexicon, which is considered rare. The data provides support for representing the tones in terms of smaller sub-tonal primitives, or tonal features, specifically H and L as opposed to other proposed tone-feature systems. We show that the features display similar behaviour (spreading, defining natural classes) to non-tonal phonological features. The data also show an apparent polarity pattern, which we analyse as phonologically conditioned allomorphy. Overall, this study adds to the documentation and study of tonal polarity and the study of phonological tone in languages with more than two tone levels.