Prominence in Indonesian Stress, Phrases, and Boundaries

Many (Western) languages have word-based stress, which entails that one, predictable syllable per word is more prominent than all the other syllables in that word. Some linguists claim that such stresses also occur in Indonesian. In this article, we set out to investigate that claim using experimental, phonetic methods. The results confirm our hypothesis that Indonesian lacks word-based stress. Yet, we do observe some kind of prominence pattern. In the last part of this article, we search for the phonological phenomenon that generates this pattern, exploring the level of the phrase to see whether phrasal accents or boundary markers are likely candidates

New Approach to Teaching Japanese Pronunciation in the Digital Era - Challenges and Practices

Pronunciation has been a black hole in the L2 Japanese classroom on account of a lack of class time, teacher\u2019s confidence, and consciousness of the need to teach pronunciation, among other reasons. The absence of pronunciation instruction is reported to result in fossilized pronunciation errors, communication problems, and learner frustration. With an intention of making a contribution to improve such circumstances, this paper aims at three goals. First, it discusses the importance, necessity, and e ectiveness of teaching prosodic aspects of Japanese pronunciation from an early stage in acquisition. Second, it shows that Japanese prosody is challenging because of its typological rareness, regardless of the L1 backgrounds of learners. Third and finally, it introduces a new approach to teaching L2 pronunciation with the goal of developing L2 comprehensibility by focusing on essential prosodic features, which is followed by discussions on key issues concerning how to implement the new approach both inside and outside the classroom in the digital era

Stress and accent in Indonesian

"For many phonologists, the odd feature with respect to Indonesian stress is the initial-dactyl effect, reported by Cohn (1989). This effect describes the distribution of secondary stresses in words of more than three syllables, which reportedly always occur on the first syllable and every odd syllable thereafter, but never adjacent to the main stress, which is penultimate (unless the penultimate syllable contains a schwa). Such rigidity in the location of secondary stress means that in words with an odd number of syllables, like the five-syllable word pascasarjana ‘postgraduate’, just one secondary stress appears, on the first syllable. The observed pattern is pàscasarjána (Cohn 1989). In stress languages, stressed and unstressed syllables usually alternate regularly. Should we apply the default metrical rules for such languages to our example we would derive pascàsarjána. Hence, Indonesian seems to belong to a group of languages that are exceptional in this respect

A functional typology of Austronesian and Papuan stress systems

"The ultimate aim of linguistics is to understand how human language works. Typological research can help to reach this aim by revealing patterns in the languages of the world. In this chapter we will focus on stress typology, and we will try to explain why some word-based stress patterns are preferred over others. Our main focus will be on the stress patterns of two very different groups of languages, viz. the Austronesian languages and the so-called Papuan languages. Basing ourselves on existing descriptions, we will compare (samples of) the stress systems of these two groups of languages to the stress patterns of the world’s languages in general

Distributed tasking in ontology mediated integration of

typological databases for linguistic researc

Stress Typology Database

The Stress Typology Database (StressTyp) contains information on the metrical (stress) systems of 500 languages, based on grammars and theoretical works. Notions covered include rule-based stress, lexical stress, extrametricality, foot types, etc