The Concatenative Structure of Tonal Overwriting.

Replacive overwriting by morphological tone has been used as major evidence for cyclic construction approaches to phonology (Hyman 2013 , Inkelas 2018 , Rolle 2018). In this article, I show that this argument is unwarranted: tonal overwriting can be derived by simple concatenation of tonal morphemes, general phonological constraints, and minimal access to morphological information—in Autosegmental Colored Containment Theory. In detailed analyses, I demonstrate that neither morpheme-specific phonology nor cyclicity is necessary to capture tonal overwriting, whereas cyclic analyses actually make wrong predictions on possible overwriting patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]