Stress and phrasal prominence in tone languages: The case of Southern Vietnamese. (16th February 2017)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Brunelle, Marc
• Is Part Of: Journal of the International Phonetic Association. Volume 47:Number 3(2017)
• Page Start: 283
• Page End: 320
• Publication Date: 2017-02-16
• Subjects: Phonetics -- Periodicals; 414.8
• DOI: 10.1017/S0025100316000402
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0025-1003

Abstract

Abstract : There is no consensus on the nature, or even the existence, of Vietnamese word stress. While some authors have proposed that it is morphosyntactically conditioned (Thompson1963, Thompson1965, Cao2003 [1978], Ngô1984 ), others have adopted the view that it is consistently word-final (Trần1967 ; Nguyễn & Ingram2006, 2007b; Phạm2008 ; Nguyễn2010 ) or that it lacks stress altogether (Emeneau1951 ). This is due to the elusive nature of word prominence in Vietnamese, and to the small number of studies that tackle the issue experimentally. In this paper, acoustic experiments designed to test previous hypotheses and tease apart possible types of prominence are presented. Southern Vietnamese disyllabic words with various morphosyntactic structures were recorded in controlled environments to test for stress and phrasal effects. Their duration, mean intensity, mean f0, f0 range and formants were then measured to assess word prominence. Results suggest that there is little evidence for word stress in Southern Vietnamese and that reports of final stress can be reinterpreted as phrase-final lengthening. Focus-marking strategies bring no additional evidence for the existence of stress, but they seem to be partly speaker- and tone-specific, which supports results obtained in studies of Northern Vietnamese (Michaud2005 ).