Editing Meeussen's rule (section)

{{Short description|Sound law}}
'''Meeussen's rule''' is a special case of [[tone (linguistics)|tone]] reduction. It was first described in [[Bantu languages]], but occurs in analyses of other languages as well, such as [[Papuan languages]].<ref>{{cite web |last1=Pennington |first1=Ryan |title=Tone in Gadsup Noun Phrases |url=https://www.sil.org/resources/archives/69106 |website=sil.org |publisher=Linguistics Society of PNG |access-date=28 December 2023}}</ref> The tonal alternation that it describes is the lowering, in some contexts, of the last tone of a pattern of two adjacent high tones (HH), resulting in the pattern HL. The phenomenon is named after its first observer, the [[Belgium|Belgian]] Bantu specialist [[A. E. Meeussen]] (1912–1978). In [[phonology|phonological]] terms, the phenomenon can be seen as a special case of the [[obligatory contour principle]].

The term "Meeussen's Rule" (the spelling with a capital ''R'' is more common) first appeared in a paper by John Goldsmith in 1981.<ref>Goldsmith (1981).</ref><ref>[https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Meeussen%27s+Rule%2CMeeussen%27s+rule%2CObligatory+Contour+Principle&year_start=1965&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=0&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2CMeeussen%20%27s%20Rule%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2CMeeussen%20%27s%20rule%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2CObligatory%20Contour%20Principle%3B%2Cc0 Google ngrams].</ref> It is based on an observation made by Meeussen in his 1963 article on the Tonga verb stating that "in a sequence of determinants, only the first is treated as a determinant".<ref>Meeussen (1963)</ref> John Goldsmith reformulated that as the rule HH > HL (or, as he expressed it, H → L / H <u>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</u>&nbsp;), which later became well known as Meeussen's rule.<ref>Goldsmith (1984b), pp. 29, 50.</ref>

Meeussen's rule is one of a number of processes in Bantu languages by which a series of consecutive high tones is avoided. The processes result in a less tonal, more accentual character in Bantu tone systems and causes a situation in which there tends to be only one tone per word or morpheme.<ref>See Laura Downing in Hulst, Harry van der; Goedemans, Rob; Zanten, Ellen van (2010) ''A Survey of Word Accentual Patterns in the Languages of the World''. de Gruyter, p. 412.</ref>