We begin by presenting a concise grammatical overview of Bena-Yungur in Section 2. Section 3 concentrates on the tone rules of the language, viz. tone spread (3.1), tone absorption (3.2) and floating tone attachment (3.3). The joint application of these tone rules is briefly illustrated in Section 3.4. Section 4 is concerned with the distribution of tones over syllables and lexemes. Sections 4.1 and 4.2 comment on the exceptional nature of contour tones on monosyllabic lexemes (4.1) and the marginal occurrence of the three-tone contour HLH on these lexemes as a result of tone spread (4.2). The analysis of the distribution of tones in lexemes allows for an internal reconstruction of the current three level Bena-Yungur tone system as a formerly two level system (Section 4.3). The major factor behind the increase of the number of tone levels in Bena-Yungur is the effect of stem-initial voiced stops as tone depressor consonants. Section 5, finally, provides a description of the morphological operations in Bena-Yungur that consist exclusively of tone changes. Nouns may acquire tone schemes different from their lexical tone patterns in certain syntactic positions (5.1) and a number of morphological processes applied to nouns and verbs assign tone schemes that override lexical tones (5.2).
