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Interim ConclusionThe discussion of the typological survey of contour tone distribution in this chapter has led to the following conclusions. First, the result of the survey argues against the traditional faithfulness approach to positional restrictions for contour tones. The argument comes from two aspects. The first one is that factors which systematically influence the duration and sonority of the rime also influence contour tone distribution. All such factors identified in Chapter 3 are either shown to affect contour tone distribution, or shown to be unlikely to produce such an effect on independent grounds. Specifically crucial here is the fact that syllables in the final position of a prosodic domain or in a shorter word are shown to be privileged contour tone carriers in some languages, since syllables in these positions are not general-purpose prominent positions—they either only benefit contrasts that specifically require the presence of abundant duration, or are not known to be privileged for any other phonological contrasts, and a traditional positional faithfulness approach does not provide an explanation for why these positions are privileged particularly for contour tones. The second crucial fact is that word-initial position, which has been shown to be a privileged position for many phonological contrasts, is not specifically privileged for contour tones. I argue that this is precisely because the word-initial position by itself does not lend extra duration to the syllable. A traditional positional faithfulness approach again does not provide an explanation as to why the initial position is perspicuously missing as a privileged position for contour tones. Second, I have shown that not only factors that serve contrastive purposes, such as segmental composition of a syllable, can influence the distribution of contour tones. Phonetic factors such as final lengthening and durational differences induced by the number of syllables in the word, which are often non-neutralization for length contrast, can also have such an effect. This vitiates the claim that only mora count is relevant in a syllable’s ability to carry contours, since the mora is generally used contrastively as a length or weight unit. We need a concept such as Canonical Durational Category that encompasses all factors that systematically influence the sonorous rime duration, contrastively or non-contrastively. Third, we have seen cases in which a binary durational distinction is not sufficient to capture all the facts about contour tone distribution. This is especially likely to happen when multiple durational factors are at play in one language. For example, in Mende, we need to make a four-way distinction: (a) long vowels in monosyllabic words, which can carry a complex contour; (b) long vowels in other positions together with short vowels in monosyllabic words, which can carry a simple rise; (c) short vowels in the final syllable of di- or polysyllabic words, which can carry a simple fall; and (d) short vowels in other positions, which cannot carry contours. In Beijing Chinese, we also need three categories: stressed syllables in the final position, which can carry a complex contour, stressed syllables in other positions, which can carry a simple contour, and unstressed syllables, which cannot carry contours. Examples like these abound in the typology. This further demonstrates the need to incorporate finer-grained durational categories in the analysis of contour tone distribution. Lastly, languages like Hausa or Pingyao Chinese in which a CVO syllable can carry a contour, but the pitch excursion of the contour is significantly smaller than the contour on CVV or CVR cannot be adequately accounted for if we assume a one-to-one mapping between tones and moras. But this can be easily incorporated into an analysis that refers to concepts such Canonical Durational Category and tonal complexity, which encode richer phonetic information than contrastive units of length and the number of tonal targets. Therefore, I conclude that the result of the survey supports only the direct approach to positional restrictions for contour tones. And putting this in the bigger picture of positional prominence in general, I claim that the data examined here rule out the general-purpose hypothesis. Looking back at the possible interpretations of positional prominence laid out in (0) in Chapter 1, we are now left with only two possibilities, as shown in (0). (0) Possible interpretations of positional prominence 
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