Seminar Series: Abstract

11.00am
September 25 2009
Seminar Room C

Palu'e Prosody
Mark Donohue (Linguistics, RSPAS)

Palu'e, an Austronesian language from south-central Indonesia, can be characterised by a basic CV structure and disyllabic root structure. There are exceptions to these patterns, but this is overwhelmingly true of the lexicon of Palu'e. Prosodically there are a number of related phenomena that need to be accounted for: epenthetic vowels, non-phonemic vowel lengthening and stress placement. The first two of these features conspire to preserve bimoraic roots, in that CCV and CV roots are 'repaired' into bimoraic structures. Stress placement is regularly trochaic; given that epenthetic vowels are visible for the purposes of minimal weight evaluation, we should expect them to be visible for the purposes of stress assignment. This is not, however, the case. If the epenthetic vowels are not phonologically visible we should expect the underlyingly CCV roots to show a long final vowel; this too is not the case. This talk explores the value of a non-rule based approach to model the apparently quixotic behaviour of prosody in Palu'e.