A diabatic correlation diagram procedure, first applied (Rose, J. P.; Kellm
an, M. E., J. Chem. Phys. 1996, 105, 7348) to H2O, is used to classify ener
gy and intensity patterns in the highly excited bending spectrum of C2H2, m
odeled by an effective spectroscopic fitting Hamiltonian. Analysis with pol
yad phase spheres accounts for the observed patterns in terms of classical
phase space structure and bifurcations of the low-energy normal modes.