摘要：Stemming from my recent survey (Green 2018) upon which this discussion is based, it is now undoubtedly a fact that replacive tone is a robust structural characteristic witnessed across most Mande languages. Up until this survey, there have been only two known attempts made at uncovering the extent to which replacive tonal phenomena are distributed across the Mande family, namely Dwyer (1973) and deZeeuw (1979) . It has been more common, at least in contemporary studies of Mande tonology, for authors to concentrate on describing and analyzing replacive tonal patterns in particular languages without probing further either i) the distribution of surface patterns throughout in the family; or ii) the mechanisms (whether diachronic or synchronic or both) that underlie the patterns. This is arguably the case in my own work on Bambara (Green 2013) and Susu (Green, Anderson & Obeng 2013) and Konoshenko’s work on varieties of Kpelle (Konoshenko 2008; Konoshenko 2014) and Kono (Konoshenko 2017) . It was with this concern in mind that the survey under discussion was undertaken, which far surpasses the coverage of Dwyer’s five‑language and deZeeuw’s eight‑language surveys by exploring replacive tonal data from nearly forty language varieties.
