This paper examines the relationship between tone and prosodic positions. I show that prosodic heads prefer higher tone over lower tone, while non-heads exhibit the opposite preference. These generalisations are expressed within Optimality Theory as a family of constraints in a fixed ranking. One set regulates the relation of tone to heads : *H\L *H\M *H\H ; the other deals with tone on nonheads : *N-H\H *N-H\M *N-H\L. These constraints are used to account for the stress system of Ayutla Mixtec : in this language, stress is attracted to a syllable based on its tonal content, but is also influenced by the posttonic syllable's tone. The implications of the theory for other tone-stress interactions-metrically influenced tone placement and neutralisation-are also examined. * I wish to thank John McCarthy, Lisa Selkirk, three anonymous reviewers and the associate editor, who offered many constructive suggestions for improvement. I am also grateful to John Kingston, Alan Prince, Keren Rice and Moira Yip for their comments on various manifestations of this work. For guidance related to the languages discussed, I thank Lee Bickmore, Barbara Hollenbach, Inga McKendry and Ken Pike. 1 In (1) and elsewhere the numbers of parentheses give the page and column in Pankratz & Pike (1967) from which the form is taken. 2 It is quite possible that the Tonal Prominence scale is a total order of all possible heights, which may number as many as six (Odden 1995 : 453ff). The examples I have collected only provide evidence for three tone-height distinctions in relation to stress (see § §3 and 6), so a conservative form of the hierarchy is used here. I am preceded in proposing a tonal hierarchy by Jiang-King (1996 : 99), who offers the hierarchy [jupper] [kraised]. I will show that more than a two-step tonal hierarchy is needed (see §3). 3 This proposal is analogous to Clements' (1997) for sonority-syllable constraints. Constraints against the least marked tone-head combinations would also have an undesirable typological effect. They would allow systems in which foot heads cannot bear tone while non-heads can : *H\H F(Tone) *N-H\H, where F(Tone) is some faithfulness constraint that preserves input tone. I know of no such system, while the opposite type of system-one where tone is only specified on heads-does exist (e.g. Yip 2001). 'phõ:mí phõ:'mí (33) Tone-driven stress in Tibetan a. b.

Markedness distinctions can be ignored. For example, in some languages stress avoids central vowels, and falls on high peripheral vowels, yet in the Uralic language Nganasan central and high peripheral vowels are treated in the same way: stress avoids both types equally. Such ' conflation ' of markedness categories is not only language-specific, but also phenomenon-specific. In contrast, dominance relations in markedness hierarchies are universal ; e.g. stress never seeks out a central vowel when a high peripheral vowel is available. This article argues that both language-specific conflation and universal markedness relations can be expressed in Optimality Theory. Constraints that refer to a markedness hierarchy must be freely rankable and mention a contiguous range of the hierarchy, including the most marked element. The empirical focus is sonority-driven stress in Nganasan and Kiriwina. In addition, Prince & Smolensky's (1993) fixed ranking theory of markedness hierarchies is shown to be unable to produce the full range of attested conflations.

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