Abstrakt
The present paper is an attempt to bring the Songhay data elicited from a native speaker of the Dendi variety of Songhay into the debate on the segmental-suprasegmental field. Unlike the most important language varieties of the Songhay cluster, Dendi offers a relatively rich tonal system, the classical distinctive functions of tone displayed occasionally even in minimal contrastive pairs of lexemes.
However, other features may co-occur in maintaining the minimal contrast in parallel to the contrast of tone, and there are also other types of relations, such as tonal polarity, primarily concerning the sets of monosyllabic morphemes which are supposed not to display their "inherent" tones, but tones which depend on their supposed tonal syntactic environment. Thus their tones are expected to be polar with the tone of the preceding syllable in the given context.
Our data indicate that - most probably due to the phrase-final position of the investigated morpheme in simple clauses - clause-final intonation/pitch neutralizes in many cases the expected high tonal contrastive polarity.