A prosodic description of Nasal: investigating stress and intonation in an endangered Sumatran language
Date
2024
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Abstract
This dissertation presents the first description of the prosody of Nasal, a Sumatran languageof the Austronesian language family spoken in Indonesia. This includes descriptions of both
the word- and utterance-level prosodic features. This prosodic description was undertaken
as part of the documentation of Nasal, and is considered a crucial part of the documentation
and description of the language as a whole.
Although much prosodic research in the past has involved description of languages based
significantly (or wholly) on impressions of the researcher, this research takes a different
approach by basing any descriptions of or conclusions about the prosodic organization of
Nasal on both experimental and quantitative evidence. Impression is still an important part
of description, but impressions are always supplemented with empirical evidence gleaned
directly from speaker audio.
The experimental portion of the study was organized in two parts: the first experiment
was a question/answer elicitation task designed to be read by native speakers in pairs; this
task featured target words in carrier sentences in which the targets varied by both sentence
position and focus. The second experiment was a controlled reading/roleplay task in which
speakers read scripted dialogues featuring a variety of real-life scenarios. It was found there
is no convincing evidence for word-level stress in Nasal. Additionally, multiple methods of
analysis were applied to the data from the second experiment and revealed that Nasal has
evidence for pitch accents and intermediate phrases in its intonation. It was also found that
questions are marked by falling intonation, while final rises are used almost exclusively for
statements or commands. These findings form an important part of the documentation of
Nasal, and support a better understanding of the prosodic typology of languages in this
region.
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Linguistics, Intonation, Language documentation, Prosody, Quantitative analysis, Stress, Sumatran
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397 pages
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