Basiese akoestiese korrelate van klemtoon in Afrikaans

Abstract

This experimental study on the acoustic correlates of stress in Afrikaans, more in particular the stress of bisyllabic Afrikaans compounds, focuses on three aims. Firstly the aim was to establish to what extent the traditionally accepted features of syllabic stress, in particular vowel stress (especially in the case of the Germanic languages) are relevant for Afrikaans too. These features are vowel length (or duration, measured in seconds), loudness (or intensity, measured in Decibels), pitch (or fundamental frequency) and vowel quality (structure of Formant 1–3). Pitch and vowel quality are both measured in Hertz. Secondly, a detailed description of these features is presented. Lastly, a possible rank order hierarchy was considered for these features in terms of their relative contribution to the manifestation of stress in Afrikaans. It seems to be difficult to establish a specific, rigid rank order for the parameters under scrutiny. What does become clear from the results of this study is that parameters' relative strengths vary from context to context. In some cases a parameter could be very strong, but in others rather weak. Moreover, the viability of establishing such rank orders is uncertain. The findings of Sluijter en van Heuven (1996) concerning stress in Dutch are endorsed to a large extent. Specifically, vowels in accented (or focus) position in a sentence exhibit distinctly different characteristics in their acoustic features when compared with vowels outside of such prominent positions. Initial syllable stress for Afrikaans bisyllabic compounds was found to be the default position in all cases analysed. A special finding of this project is that vowel quality, expressed in terms of formant structure, plays an important role in the manifestation of stress. On the other hand, the absence of stress noticeably leads to vowel reduction, which is expressed in terms of the formant structure chance of /A/, the vowel under scrutiny in this study. Collaboration between sentence accent and syllable position has been proved to be the optimal environment for the expression of linguistic stress. This is a new perspective on the topic of stress. Sluijter en Van Heuven (1996) did not mention this facet in their studies on Dutch accent and stress. Stress on the initial syllable of Afrikaans bisyllabic compound words has been confirmed throughout the study as default position.