Demarcating and highlighting in Papuan Malay phrase prosody

Phrase-level prosody serves two essential functions in many languages of the world: chunking information into units (demarcating) and marking important information (highlighting). Recent work suggests that prosody has a mainly demarcating function in the Trade Malay language family. That is, the use of pitch accents in these languages is limited or absent, as the main prosodic events occur on the final two syllables in a phrase. The current study investigates the extent to which Papuan Malay phrase prosody is used for demarcating and highlighting, taking into account the potential influence of word stress. This is done by means of acoustic analyses on a corpus of spontaneous speech. Both the form (F0 movement) and the possible functions (demarcating and highlighting) of the final two syllables in Papuan Malay phrases are investigated. Although most results favor the demarcating function of Papuan Malay phrase prosody, a highlighting function cannot be ruled out. The results suggest that Papuan Malay might hold an exceptional position in the typology of prosodic prominence.