Prominence marking in an edge-prominent language - the case of Drehu

Abstract

This study investigates prominence marking and phrasing of prosodic constituents in Drehu, an Oceanic language from New Caledonia. This analysis is concerned with the marking of prominence in informational focus. First impressionistic descriptions of Drehu state there is fixed word initial stress, however recent experimental evidence does not support this claim. To determine whether the patterns recorded in the literature are borne out, the prosodic and phonetic realisation of post-lexical word prominence is investigated. An experiment was conducted to examine the extent to which fundamental frequency and duration contribute to the signalling of prominence in Drehu. Further, the goal is to provide a description of tonal patterns that allows for a cross-linguistic comparison, from a prosodic typological perspective. The results show that prominence is marked with longer duration and a H* tone, realised on the word final syllable. A phrase initial low tone and the phrase final high tone demarcate the prosodic word.