Red and blue bananas: Time-series f0 analysis of contrastively focused noun phrases in Papuan Malay and Dutch

Abstract

The prosody of Papuan Malay, spoken in the easternmost provinces of Indonesia, is not fully described and understood. The limited work available suggests that phrase prosody in this language is different from other well-studied (West-Germanic) languages. However, not much is known about possible correlates of focus marking, for which prosody is used extensively in languages like Dutch and English. To gain insight into universal and specific usages of prosody, this study reports two identical production experiments and acoustic analyses carried out for Papuan Malay and Dutch, to investigate the prosody of noun phrases in different contrastive focus conditions. Participants in the experiments described pictures with different shapes and colors using specific matrix phrases. The prosody of these descriptions was examined by time-series measures of f0 and statistically analysed using generalised additive mixed models (GAMMs). Results show that speakers of Papuan Malay do not use f0 to mark contrastively focused noun phrases, unlike Dutch speakers. The main function of f0 in Papuan Malay phrases appears to be boundary marking on the final syllable in the phrase, a function also observed in Dutch. In addition, the pre-final syllable in the Papuan Malay phrase was always marked with a rising f0, whereas in Dutch an interaction between the boundary and focus marking was found. The results are discussed in a typological perspective and provide new insights into the prosody of Papuan Malay.