Dogon grammatical tone patterns triggered only by 3-part syntactic combinations

What is it about?

Much of Dogon tonosyntax can be explained by recursive application of one-on-one tonal interactions between a noun and a modifier, repeated as more modifiers are added at the edges. This paper describes cases in some Dogon languages where this recursive model fails, so that larger constructions with at least three elements have their own unpredictable tonal patterns.

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Why is it important?

shows that multi-word constructions must be recognivized in tonal grammar.