Stress, tone and discourse prominence in the Curaçao dialect of Papiamentu

Abstract

This paper investigates the word-prosodic system of the Curaçao dialect of Papiamentu. Curaçao Papiamentu has both lexically distinctive stress and, independently, a word-level tone contrast. On the basis of a detailed acoustic investigation of this tonal contrast, we propose a privative phonological interpretation of the tone contrast, similar to proposals for the Scandinavian word-accent systems (Riad 1998, to appear). As compared to previous treatments of Curaçao Papiamentu word prosody, our hypothesis makes crucial reference to intonation and to tonal underspecification. We also investigate the realisation of primary and secondary stress in Curaçao Papiamentu.

The prosodic expression of focus, contrast and givenness: A production study of Hungarian

“…Call the latter type obligatory syntactic focus marking 15 languages. While the prosody of focus has been widely studied in languages that 16 optionally utilize word order in the marking of focus (including Germanic and 17…”

“…14 15 2.1. Information focus, contrastive focus, background and givenness 16 Although focus is a multi--faceted notion that has been approached in diverging ways, 17 most accounts agree that the focused part of a sentence is associated with some type of 18 pragmatic prominence. Here we follow a common view held by formal pragmatic 19 approaches that focus indicates the presence of (contextually restricted) alternatives to 20 the focused element with which alternative propositions can be formed that are 21 relevant to the interpretation of the current sentence (Rooth 1985(Rooth , 1996; call these 22…”

“…(i) The default accent type in the comment is falling, and has been 26 analysed by some as H*+L. 16 The accent types appearing in the topic are much more 27 varied, including H* and L*, optionally combined with various (φ-- and/or ι--level) edge 28 tones.…”

Are Indonesians sensitive to contrastive accentuation below the word level?

“…A language has either tone or stress but not both. To be true, there are so-called restricted tone languages in which only one syllable in a word may carry different tones (for example, Swedish, Norwegian) but languages that freely combine stress and tone are highly exceptional and may arise only as the result of accidental contact between a stress language and a tone language such as Samate MaÈ ya (Remijsen 2002) or Papiamentu (Remijsen and Van Heuven 2005). The fourth logical possibility is a language that has neither stress nor tone.…”

The prosody-syntax interface and the status of pronouns in Papiamentu

“…In contrast, ta preceding an adjectival predicate, as in (2b), polarises with the immediately adjacent tone of that predicate; in that case, tone polarisation has iterated leftward from bon, affecting first copula ta before reaching mi. Remijsen & Van Heuven, 2005) -alternating H and L tones appear in the surface realisation of polysyllabic forms, showing that melody in Pp is essentially a rhythmic property. 11 The assignment of tone to mi in (2) clearly follows this rhythmic pattern -although seemingly extending outside the domain of the word.…”