TY - JOUR
T1 - Lexical analyses of the function and phonology of Papuan Malay word stress
AU - Kaland, Constantijn
AU - Kluge, Angela
AU - Van Heuven, Vincent J.
N1 - Funding Information:
Funding sources : The research for this paper has been funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) – Project-ID 281511265 – SFB 1252 Prominence in Language.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston 2021.
PY - 2021/4/1
Y1 - 2021/4/1
N2 - The existence of word stress in Indonesian languages has been controversial. Recent acoustic analyses of Papuan Malay suggest that this language has word stress, counter to other studies and unlike closely related languages. The current study further investigates Papuan Malay by means of lexical (non-acoustic) analyses of two different aspects of word stress. In particular, this paper reports two distribution analyses of a word corpus, 1) investigating the extent to which stress patterns may help word recognition and 2) exploring the phonological factors that predict the distribution of stress patterns. The facilitating role of stress patterns in word recognition was investigated in a lexical analysis of word embeddings. The results show that Papuan Malay word stress (potentially) helps to disambiguate words. As for stress predictors, a random forest analysis investigated the effect of multiple morpho-phonological factors on stress placement. It was found that the mid vowels /E/ and /E/ play a central role in stress placement, refining the conclusions of previous work that mainly focused on /E/. The current study confirms that non-acoustic research on stress can complement acoustic research in important ways. Crucially, the combined findings on stress in Papuan Malay so far give rise to an integrated perspective to word stress, in which phonetic, phonological and cognitive factors are considered.
AB - The existence of word stress in Indonesian languages has been controversial. Recent acoustic analyses of Papuan Malay suggest that this language has word stress, counter to other studies and unlike closely related languages. The current study further investigates Papuan Malay by means of lexical (non-acoustic) analyses of two different aspects of word stress. In particular, this paper reports two distribution analyses of a word corpus, 1) investigating the extent to which stress patterns may help word recognition and 2) exploring the phonological factors that predict the distribution of stress patterns. The facilitating role of stress patterns in word recognition was investigated in a lexical analysis of word embeddings. The results show that Papuan Malay word stress (potentially) helps to disambiguate words. As for stress predictors, a random forest analysis investigated the effect of multiple morpho-phonological factors on stress placement. It was found that the mid vowels /E/ and /E/ play a central role in stress placement, refining the conclusions of previous work that mainly focused on /E/. The current study confirms that non-acoustic research on stress can complement acoustic research in important ways. Crucially, the combined findings on stress in Papuan Malay so far give rise to an integrated perspective to word stress, in which phonetic, phonological and cognitive factors are considered.
KW - morphophonology
KW - phonetics
KW - phonetics-phonology interface
KW - prosody
KW - word stress
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85106091491&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1515/phon-2021-2003
DO - 10.1515/phon-2021-2003
M3 - Article
C2 - 33892529
AN - SCOPUS:85106091491
VL - 78
SP - 141
EP - 168
IS - 2
ER -