Oceanic languages are often described as preferring primary stress on penultimate syllables, but detailed surveys show that many different types of prominence patterns have been reported across and within Oceanic language families. In some cases, these interact with segmental and phonotactic factors, such as syllable weight. The range of Oceanic prominence patterns is exemplified across Vanuatu, a linguistically diverse archipelago with over 130 languages. However, both impressionistic and instrumentally-based descriptions of prosodic patterns and their correlates are limited for languages of this region. This paper investigates prominence in Nafsan, an Oceanic language of Vanuatu for which previous observations of prominence differ. Acoustic and durational results for disyllabic and trisyllabic Nafsan words show a clear pattern of higher fundamental frequency values in final syllables, regardless of vowel length, pointing towards a preference for prominence at the right edge of words. Short vowels also show centralisation in penultimate syllables, providing supporting evidence for right-edge prominence and informing the understanding of vowel deletion processes in Nafsan.
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April 2020
April 30 2020
Acoustic evidence for right-edge prominence in Nafsana) Available to Purchase
Special Collection:
Phonetics of Under-Documented Languages
Rosey Billington
;
Rosey Billington
b)
ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, School of Languages and Linguistics, The University of Melbourne
, Melbourne, Victoria 3052, Australia
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Janet Fletcher
;
Janet Fletcher
c)
ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, School of Languages and Linguistics, The University of Melbourne
, Melbourne, Victoria 3052, Australia
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Nick Thieberger
;
Nick Thieberger
d)
ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, School of Languages and Linguistics, The University of Melbourne
, Melbourne, Victoria 3052, Australia
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Ben Volchok
Ben Volchok
ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, School of Languages and Linguistics, The University of Melbourne
, Melbourne, Victoria 3052, Australia
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Rosey Billington
b)
ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, School of Languages and Linguistics, The University of Melbourne
, Melbourne, Victoria 3052, Australia
Janet Fletcher
c)
ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, School of Languages and Linguistics, The University of Melbourne
, Melbourne, Victoria 3052, Australia
Nick Thieberger
d)
ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, School of Languages and Linguistics, The University of Melbourne
, Melbourne, Victoria 3052, Australia
Ben Volchok
ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, School of Languages and Linguistics, The University of Melbourne
, Melbourne, Victoria 3052, Australia
b)
Electronic mail: [email protected], ORCID: 0000-0003-2708-5027.
c)
ORCID: 0000-0001-7223-4533.
d)
ORCID: 0000-0001-8797-1018.
a)
Portions of this work were presented at the 17th Australasian International Speech Science and Technology Conference, Sydney, Australia, December 2018.
J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 147, 2829–2844 (2020)
Article history
Received:
May 03 2019
Accepted:
October 16 2019
Citation
Rosey Billington, Janet Fletcher, Nick Thieberger, Ben Volchok; Acoustic evidence for right-edge prominence in Nafsan. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 1 April 2020; 147 (4): 2829–2844. https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0000995
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