Stress and accent in Indonesian

Abstract

"For many phonologists, the odd feature with respect to Indonesian stress is the initial-dactyl effect, reported by Cohn (1989). This effect describes the distribution of secondary stresses in words of more than three syllables, which reportedly always occur on the first syllable and every odd syllable thereafter, but never adjacent to the main stress, which is penultimate (unless the penultimate syllable contains a schwa). Such rigidity in the location of secondary stress means that in words with an odd number of syllables, like the five-syllable word pascasarjana ‘postgraduate’, just one secondary stress appears, on the first syllable. The observed pattern is pàscasarjána (Cohn 1989). In stress languages, stressed and unstressed syllables usually alternate regularly. Should we apply the default metrical rules for such languages to our example we would derive pascàsarjána. Hence, Indonesian seems to belong to a group of languages that are exceptional in this respect"