Crosslinguistically it has been assumed that only marked tones can spread, but in Huehuetepec Tlapanec all three levels of tones, low, mid and high, can spread. Among these, the low tone is the least marked tone in the sense that it can only spread to a tone-bearing unit underspecified for tone, and only low tone can accept spreading of other tones. On the other hand, the mid tone is the least marked according to other diagnostics for tonal markedness, namely defaultness and floatability. This results in markedness paradox. This paper will describe in detail such paradox and urge reconsideration of tonal markedness.

This paper reviews the tonal system of Herero, a Bantu language spoken in Namibia and Botswana, and discusses the phenomenon of high tone descent observed in this language. In Herero, when three or more high tones occur in a row, the second and subsequent Hs are sometimes lowered. Previous studies have explained this phenomenon as a downstep H caused by a floating L. By taking a closer look at the environment in which this occurs, this paper argues that this is a downstep H that occurred for another reason.

Starting with tracking the tone changes in the Bangkok Thai over the past century, a crosslinguistic trend, referred to as “clockwise cycle”, has been revealed. On the other hand, Northern Vietnamese is a quite rare language, which has glottalized tones that are absent in Thai, along with the accumulation of acoustic data in the past 70 years. Therefore, this paper tracks the acoustic data of Northern Vietnamese. As a result, while modal tones exhibit clockwise cycle motivated by the progressive coarticulation effect of fo, non-modal tones may exhibit another changing trend motivated by the regressive coarticulation effect of phonatory characteristics.

Based on prosodic data collected in Kuroshima and Kohamajima, this paper discusses their proto-prosodic-system. The study proposes that the proto-prosodic-system of the Yaeyama Islands consists of three tonal patterns—*L, *LH, and *HL for Pattern A, Pattern B, and Pattern C respectively—in which the prominence (H-tone) of Pattern C is assigned to the first phonological word, and the one of Pattern B to the second one. The paper then proposes that the H-tone is associated with the last syllable of each phonological word for Pattern C and Pattern B in the proto-prosodic-system of Kuroshima and Kohamajima, from which the system of Kuroshima undergoes the tonal pattern consisting of two prominence peaks (the HLH tonal pattern), which then undergoes the change of *HLH>HLL.

Pinjam is morphophonemic tone neutralization in Cantonese whose detailed facts have been described since Yue-Hashimoto (1972) and whose basic mechanism has been unveiled since Yip (1980). Subsequent studies have elaborated extensive analyses in various morphological alternations. However, dynamic facts about its variation and change have not been well understood. Also, the interaction between pinjam and tone sandhi is still a mystery that involves opacity. So our goal is to empirically validate new facts about its variation and change and show a unified model using Optimality Theory that accounts for the apparently chaotic phenomena including its opaque interactions with tone sandhi.

This paper examines interrogative intonation in Shanghai Chinese from two perspectives: shēngdiào yīnyù (tonal range) and boundary tone. The former refers to the paradigmatic pitch range proposed by intonation studies in China, while the latter has been assigned at the end of sentences within the framework of Intonational Phonology. Preliminary analyses of Shanghai interrogatives reveal that the previous interpretation of boundary tones is not supported; however, it is still unclear whether the interpretation of the tonal range is applicable to the results.