A prosodic description of Nasal: investigating stress and intonation in an endangered Sumatran language

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dc.contributor.advisorMcDonnell, Bradley
dc.contributor.advisorSchafer, Amy
dc.contributor.authorHakim, Jacob Abadir
dc.contributor.departmentLinguistics
dc.date.accessioned2025-02-20T22:36:42Z
dc.date.available2025-02-20T22:36:42Z
dc.date.issued2024
dc.description.degreePh.D.
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/10125/110195
dc.subjectLinguistics
dc.subjectIntonation
dc.subjectLanguage documentation
dc.subjectProsody
dc.subjectQuantitative analysis
dc.subjectStress
dc.subjectSumatran
dc.titleA prosodic description of Nasal: investigating stress and intonation in an endangered Sumatran language
dc.typeThesis
dcterms.abstractThis 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.
dcterms.extent397 pages
dcterms.languageen
dcterms.publisherUniversity of Hawai'i at Manoa
dcterms.rightsAll UHM dissertations and theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission from the copyright owner.
dcterms.typeText
local.identifier.alturihttp://dissertations.umi.com/hawii:12374

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