Billington Rosey, Fletcher Janet, Thieberger Nick, Volchok Ben
ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, School of Languages and Linguistics, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria 3052, Australia.
J Acoust Soc Am. 2020 Apr;147(4):2829. doi: 10.1121/10.0000995.
Oceanic languages are often described as preferring primary stress on penultimate syllables, but detailed surveys show that many different types of prominence patterns have been reported across and within Oceanic language families. In some cases, these interact with segmental and phonotactic factors, such as syllable weight. The range of Oceanic prominence patterns is exemplified across Vanuatu, a linguistically diverse archipelago with over 130 languages. However, both impressionistic and instrumentally-based descriptions of prosodic patterns and their correlates are limited for languages of this region. This paper investigates prominence in Nafsan, an Oceanic language of Vanuatu for which previous observations of prominence differ. Acoustic and durational results for disyllabic and trisyllabic Nafsan words show a clear pattern of higher fundamental frequency values in final syllables, regardless of vowel length, pointing towards a preference for prominence at the right edge of words. Short vowels also show centralisation in penultimate syllables, providing supporting evidence for right-edge prominence and informing the understanding of vowel deletion processes in Nafsan.
大洋洲语言通常被描述为倾向于将主重音置于倒数第二个音节上，但详细的调查表明，在大洋洲语系内部和不同语系之间，人们报告了许多不同类型的重音模式。在某些情况下，这些模式会与诸如音节重量等音段和音位结构因素相互作用。大洋洲重音模式的范围在瓦努阿图得到了体现，这是一个语言多样的群岛，有超过130种语言。然而，对于该地区语言的韵律模式及其相关特征，基于印象和仪器的描述都很有限。本文研究了瓦努阿图的一种大洋洲语言纳夫桑语中的重音情况，此前对其重音的观察结果存在差异。双音节和三音节纳夫桑语单词的声学和时长结果显示，无论元音长度如何，最后一个音节的基频值都明显更高，这表明单词右边缘更倾向于出现重音。短元音在倒数第二个音节中也表现出央化，为右边缘重音提供了支持性证据，并有助于理解纳夫桑语中的元音删除过程。
