This paper deals with the domains of some phonological rules of Baule, a Bia language of the Central Tano group (Stewart 1989) spoken in Côte d'Ivoire, West Africa. Like the other languages in this group, Baule has phonological Low and High tones, and a Low tone lowers the register of following High tones – the phenomenon widely referred to as downdrift. But Baule is distinguished from other members of the Central Tano group (and, indeed, from other downdrifting languages that we have studied) in that, within specified domains, sequences of two or more High tones exhibit a rise in pitch over the sequence.

In this paper we show that the occurrence of the rising pattern over High-tone sequences helps to make a clear distinction in Baule between the prosodic word and the morphological word, in line with the results of Selkirk (1980), Nespor & Vogel (1986), Inkelas (1990) and others. We motivate the Baule prosodic word as a phonological constituent whose delimitation is based on the morphological word, but with modifications based on language-particular syntactic, morphological and phonological considerations. Baule prosodic words include, along with simple morphological words that are lexical items in the language, compounds, proper names, noun+adjective and noun+numeral constructions. Other prosodic words are formed by affixing monosyllabic elements (including pronouns, nouns and numerals) to adjacent lexical units.