Lexical tone in Magey Matbat

Abstract

"In this paper, I present a descriptive analysis of the comparatively rich tonal system of Magey Matbat, a language of the Raja Ampat islands, Papua Province. The original analysis was part of my PhD thesis (Remijsen 2001a). Since then, I have checked my analysis of the Magey Matbat tone system by means of further fieldwork research. Improvements to the original analysis have been incorporated in the current paper. The paper is structured as follows. After introducing the Magey Matbat language, I will present an impressionistic phonological analysis of its lexical tone system. Then an acoustic analysis is presented that corroborates the impressionistic analysis, and that provides detailed information on the phonetic realization of the lexical tone patterns. In the conclusion, the Magey Matbat tone system is compared with that of Ma»ya, and I discuss the origin of lexical tone in Matbat and Ma»ya, both Austronesian languages"