The Acoustic Manifestation of Prominence in Stressless Languages

Abstract

Languages frequently express focus by enhancing various acoustic attributes of an utterance, but it is widely accepted that the main enhancement appears on stressed syllables. In languages without lexical stress, the question arises as to how focus is acoustically manifested. We thus examine the acoustic properties associated with prominence in three stressless languages, Indonesian, Korean and Vietnamese, comparing real three-syllable words in non-focused and focused contexts. Despite other prosodic differences, our findings confirm that none of the languages exhibits stress in the absence of focus, and under focus, no syllable shows consistent enhancement that could be indirectly interpreted as a manifestation of focus. Instead, a combination of boundary phenomena consistent with the right edge of a major prosodic constituent (Intonational Phrase) appears in each language: increased duration on the final syllable and in Indonesian and Korean, a decrease in F0. Since these properties are also found in languages with stress, we suggest that boundary phenomena signaling a major prosodic constituent break are used universally to indicate focus, regardless of a language's word-prosody; stress languages may use the same boundary properties, but these are most likely to be combined with enhancement of the stressed syllable of a word.

A Literature Study on the Intonation of Colloquial Indonesian

“…A more recent study by Athanasopoulou and Vogel (2016) has found that acoustic effects of focus on Indonesian trisyllabic words (serve as the object in SVOAdv pattern) are shown by (1) an increase in duration for the last two syllables and (2) a decrease in F 0 for the final syllable of the target word. Pitch accent is not obligatory in the form of an increase in F 0 since obtrusion of a pitch at a particular point from the surrounding syllables is essential to determine the position of pitch accent Cruttenden (1997).…”

“…First, there is no single word in Indonesian whose syllable, by default, regardless its location in a sentence will serve as the docking station of the fluctuating pitch movement (see Zanten and Goedemans 2009). Next, pitch movements occur coincidently with a major prosodic break which makes the so-called phrasal-accent consistently happens somewhere near the right edge of the phrase-final word (see Athanasopoulou and Vogel 2016). Thus, the acoustic manifestation of prominence in Indonesian is in line with the general theory concerning focal structure in languages without lexical stress, that Jeon and Nolan (2017) regard as prosodic phrasing phenomenon and phonetic events near prosodic boundaries.…”