Word Prominence in Languages of Southern Asia

Abstract

AbstractIn this chapter, we survey what we term ‘prominence at the word-level’ in the languages of greater South and Southeast Asia that demonstrate polysynthesis, specifically languages belonging to the Tibeto-Burman and Austroasiatic phyla. We show that despite assumptions to the contrary, ‘polysynthesis’ is commonly observed in languages of South Asia, particularly those belonging to the Tibeto-Burman and Austroasiatic (Munda) families. Word-level accent and prominence may be a prominent feature of Munda languages, but the phonetic and word-prosodic details are still debated and in need of further research and verification. It is not clear how prosodic words differ from grammatical words in the languages phonologically, whether the data described for the Munda languages to date actually reflects word-level, reference other prosodic domains (various phrasal levels or utterance-level phenomena), or may rather be due to information structure uses of pitch, for example, for focus. In Tibeto-Burman, stress is a less salient indicator of word-level prominence, but tonal and segmental patterns tend to illuminate either initial or final prominence at the word-level, following a roughly west-east geographic split.