Predicting the relative importance of prosodic cues from linguistic structure - the case of stress and tone in the word prosody of Samate Ma`ya

Bert Remijsen

Lexical stress can be marked by a variety of prosodic parameters, such as duration, fundamental frequency (F0), vowel quality and spectral balance. According to the Functional Load Hypothesis (Berinstein 1979), the importance of specific prosodic parameters is not a fixed linguistic universal, but instead depends language specifically on phonological structure. In a tone language, for instance, fundamental frequency (F0) cannot be a stress correlate, because it is already used to distinguish the paradigmatic tonal contrast. In the strongest form of the Functional Load Hypothesis (FLH), the potential use of a prosodic parameter as a stress cue is precluded if it encodes other phonological distinctions in the sound system of the language. In order to test the validity of the FLH in a tone language, we have to study a tone language with lexically contrastive stress. Claims that such languages exist have been made - e.g. for Papiamentu, but have never been supported by acoustic evidence. I claim that the Austronesian tone language Samate Ma`ya (van der Leeden 1993) features lexically contrastive stress. This claim is based on (i) a study of the word prosodic phonology and (ii) an acoustic investigation of minimal stress pairs. This rare typological structure makes Ma`ya an ideal test-case for the FLH.

References

Berinstein, A.E. (1979). A Cross-Linguistic Study on the Perception and Production of Stress. UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics 47.

Leeden, A.C. van der (1993). Ma`ya: A Language Study: A. Phonology. Jakarta - Lembaga Ilmu Pengetahuan Indonesia - Rijksuniversiteit Leiden Series 2A.