METRICAL STRESS IN MANDAR PHONOLOGY AND POETRY

Abstract

This short paper is to extend the theory of metrical phonology to the system of stress in one language of Indonesia: Mandar. As the subfamily of South Sulawesi language, Mandar is spoken on the northern coast of West Sulawesi province, from the city of Polewali in the east to the town of Tinambung in the west. The data itself is gathered from native Mandar speaker which provides a good representation of the language. This paper has surveyed the distribution of word-level stress in Mandar from the perspective of the theory of metrical phonology. It has shown that the language typically requires each prosodic word to host a single instance of stress on penultimate syllable. The final proposal is to have the stress pattern emerge from the construction of a single disyllabic trochee at the right edge of the word, with the trochee requires first syllable to be heavy (CVC or CVV) and second syllable to be light (CV or CVC as word-final consonant are non-moraic, but not CVV). From this position, we have shown that our metrical analysis allows us to see another property of traditional Kalinda’da’ poetry: beyond showing a regular number of syllables in each line, these poems also require different numbers of stresses. We leave it to future work to extend this result.