Tonal scaling and alignment in Javanese

The present study provides basic insights into the tonal properties of Javanese, an Austronesian language that is mainly spoken in the central and eastern parts of Java, Indonesia. This language is particularly interesting with regard to prosody be-cause it lacks lexical stress and lexical tone. A pilot production study was conducted with a single speaker, who produced a total of 96 sentences with SVO word order. The distribution of tonal events suggests that the sentences are subdivided into two prosodic phrases, one containing the subject and another one containing the remaining material. Both phrases involved a local pitch rise on the final syllable. In sentence-final position, the pitch peak was followed by a fall in case a sonorant coda consonant was present, but not if such a consonant was absent. Based on these findings, a preliminary account on the tonal patterns of Javanese is discussed, addressing several discrepancies found in the literature.