Tone raising and tone lowering in Bafut

While a lot has been said about H tone lowering after a L tone in Bafut, L tone raising before a non-L tone remains a less studied phenomenon. This paper seeks to describe these two tone phenomena in the language, which result from two phonologically contrastive pitch levels. Our findings are that in addition to the better known H tone lowering, there also exists L tone raising and the apparent complexity of the two phenomena is best understood in terms of the involvement of the interaction of tone features. We argue that the data are best analysed within a theory that recognises a register tier (Snider, The geometry and features of tone, Summer Institute of Linguistics and University of Texas at Arlington, 1999).