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Stress, tone and discourse prominence in the Curaçao dialect of Papiamentu

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 November 2005

Bert Remijsen  and
Vincent J. van Heuven
Bert Remijsen
Affiliation:
LUCL, University of Leiden
Vincent J. van Heuven
Affiliation:
LUCL, University of Leiden
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Abstract

This paper investigates the word-prosodic system of the Curaçao dialect of Papiamentu. Curaçao Papiamentu has both lexically distinctive stress and, independently, a word-level tone contrast. On the basis of a detailed acoustic investigation of this tonal contrast, we propose a privative phonological interpretation of the tone contrast, similar to proposals for the Scandinavian word-accent systems (Riad 1998, to appear). As compared to previous treatments of Curaçao Papiamentu word prosody, our hypothesis makes crucial reference to intonation and to tonal underspecification. We also investigate the realisation of primary and secondary stress in Curaçao Papiamentu.

Type
Research Article
Information
Phonology , Volume 22 , Issue 2 , August 2005 , pp. 205 - 235
Copyright
2005 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

The recordings were made in Willemstad, Curaçao, in the offices of the Fundashon pa Planifikashon di Idioma (FPI), an institute whose functions include the production of language-learning resources for Papiamentu and the translation of books for all ages. Farienne Martis of the FPI supervised the recording sessions. We are very grateful to her. The first author also gratefully acknowledges the hospitality of the FPI, and of its director, Ronnie Severing, which he and his wife enjoyed for three months. We gratefully acknowledge advice on Papiamentu from Farienne Martis, Philippe Maurer, Enrique Muller, Igma van Putte-de Windt and Ini Statia. We are very grateful to three anonymous reviewers, the associate editor and the editors. We also gratefully acknowledge feedback on a prefinal draft from José Hualde, Bob Ladd, Mits Ota and Alice Turk, and from the participants in the Typology symposium (Cascais, Portugal, April 2004), part of the European Science Foundation Network ‘Tone and Intonation in Europe’. Finally, we gratefully acknowledge Olle Engstrand, who provided the sound materials represented in Fig. 6. This research was funded by a grant (#355-70-014) from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research.