The intonation of Manado Malay

Abstract

"In this paper I will give an overview of the intonation of Manado Malay. Intonation is a topic that is often ignored in grammars of Indonesian languages. This is a serious shortcoming, as intonation is an essential part of the spoken language. The description that is presented here is based on the autosegmental-metrical framework developed by Pierrehumbert (1980), Beckman and Pierrehumbert (1986), and Ladd (1996).41 In this model, the tonal structure of an utterance is composed of edge tones, which are associated with the edges of prosodic domains, and pitch accents, which are associated with stressed syllables. In Manado Malay, there is typically no more than one pitch accent in an utterance. Beside this one focus-marking accent, discourse particles may appear to carry an accent as well, but I will argue that these are in fact edge tones. I will discuss the intonation of statements, questions, and a few more specialized constructions. I will also compare the intonation of Manado Malay with that of two other Indonesian languages"