This study explores whether or not tonal contours are a contrastive feature in Sawi nouns. It aims to provide evidence towards the claim that Sawi has lost contrastive tones and provide a basis from which further research into how the use of qualitative vowel differences may have replaced the pitch accent system still found in Sawi’s closest relative, Palula. This was done through the analysis of a corpus of Sawi nouns with a computer program that visually stylizes prosodic and tonal features in audio samples of the language. This corpus was then analyzed for trends within itself as well as compared to known trends in the Palula lexicon. The findings support the original hypothesis that Sawi nouns do not have contrastive pitch accents, as found in Palula; and that further research may reveal a regular or semi-regular tonal contour accentuating the final mora of each noun.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:su-136539 |
| Date | January 2014 |
| Creators | Gomes, Andrew |
| Publisher | Stockholms universitet, Institutionen för lingvistik |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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