No stress, no pitch accent, no prosodic focus: the case of Ambonese Malay

• Published in: Phonology Vol. 33; no. 2; pp. 353 - 389
• Main Authors: Maskikit-Essed, Raechel, Gussenhoven, Carlos
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Cambridge, UK Cambridge University Press 01-08-2016
• Subjects: Accentuation; Analysis; Indonesian; Indonesian language; Intonation; Language varieties; Languages; Malay language; Malayo Polynesian Languages; Phonetics; Phonology; Pitch; Prosody; Sentences; Stress; Syllables; Syntax; Tone; Hong Kong China; Moluccas; China; Indonesia
• ISSN: 0952-6757; 1469-8188
• DOI: 10.1017/S0952675716000154

Varieties of Malay, including Indonesian, have been variously described as having word stress on the penultimate syllable, as having variable word stress and as having a phrase-final pitch accent without word stress. In Ambonese Malay, the alignment of sentence-final pitch peaks fails to support the existence of either word stress or phrase-final pitch accents. Also, the shape of its pitch peaks fails to vary systematically with the information status of the phrase-final word. The two intonation melodies of the language include phrase-final boundary-tone complexes which do not associate with any syllables. The declarative rise-fall would appear to be timed so as to occur within the last word of the sentence. Minimal stress pairs presented in earlier descriptions show a contrast between /a/ and a segmentally distinct weak /ă/, a contrast that also appears in positions that have not been claimed to have stress. A preliminary phonological analysis concludes the account.