Goals

• define the questions that are relevant when you think you are dealing with something tonal
• produce examples and guidelines which help make published studies more interpretable, comparable, and reproducible
• how to start, and how to discover
• agree on the component tasks (cf Hyman's 3 stages)
  
• to downplay the importance of the work we're doing, because *tone is very normal*

Activities

• here is some data and some guidelines; try analyzing the data according to the guidelines
  
• here is some data: how many tones are there?
• here are multiple presentations of the same data: audio; fine phonetic transcription; cleaned up phonological transcriptions; different ways of representing the same level of data (F0 tracks; F0 values; 1-2-3-4-5 notations; 4-3-2-1 notations; H M L notations; á a à notations)
  
• here is some data: what part of the data can be called "tonal"? (cf., Carlos Gussenhoven's work on tone languages near Cologne with no pitch component)
• At what point can we consider a morphologically significant pitch pattern to be indicative of a tonal language (Samoan ergative case marking by HL)?
• organise a combination of position papers, discussion, and agreed-upon conclusions centred around xxx thematic workshops:
• what surface contrasts can exist, and what can confound their analysis?
• where can the variation (in both possible underlying forms and in surface variation) be found in a language (parts of speech, generation, tone sandhi…);
• what effect do different tones/segments have on the realisation of tonal contrasts?, and xxxxx;
• what are the correspondences between acoustic and perceptual analyses of the same phenomena?
• what does it mean to be a tone language (in terms of other phonetic/phonological parameters, in terms or morphological tendencies, in terms of syntactic leanings)?

Sessions

• four 90-minute sessions per day; free evenings for unstructured discussion
  
• thematic sessions: 2-3 short presentations, possible commentary by someone who read these abstracts, then break into three groups of ~5 people to discuss, then report back (student to collate and circulate notes) -- we will need about 6 of these sessions
  
• task sessions: short introduction, break into five groups of ~3 people to do the task and discuss issues, then report back
• drafting sessions?: compile guidelines?