Betawi Malay word prosody

Betawi Malay is an Austronesian language with no word-based stress, but with phrasal accent. We recorded four speakers (two male, two female), who produced target words in utterance-medial and utterance-final position, and with the target words in or out of focus. We present a detailed acoustic analysis of the pitch patterns realised on the focused target words. The results show that both the shapes and the positions of the pitch configurations are highly variable. The choice of a particular variant is governed non-deterministically (by gradient rules) by (i) the presence of schwa in the pre-final syllable and (ii) an utterance boundary following the target. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.