17.203, Review: Syntax/Phonology/Austronesian Lang: Stoel (2005)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-17-203. Sat Jan 21 2006. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 17.203, Review: Syntax/Phonology/Austronesian Lang: Stoel (2005)

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1)
Date: 20-Jan-2006
From: Catherine Fortin < fortinc at umich.edu >
Subject: Focus in Manado Malay: Grammar, particles, and intonation 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Sat, 21 Jan 2006 19:59:45
From: Catherine Fortin < fortinc at umich.edu >
Subject: Focus in Manado Malay: Grammar, particles, and intonation 
 

Author: Ruben Bastiaan Stoel 
Title: Focus in Manado Malay 
Subtitle: Grammar, particles, and intonation 
Publisher: CNWS Publications
Year: 2005
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/16/16-1624.html 

Catherine R. Fortin, Department of Linguistics, University of Michigan

INTRODUCTION

Focus in Manado Malay, Ruben Stoel's (Leiden University) Ph.D. dissertation, 
represents the very first publication on the intonation of Manado Malay 
(MM) and is one of only a few publications available on MM generally.  The 
phenomenon of focus-marking in MM is approached from two directions:  
the first half of the book contains a description of focus-marking in MM, 
based largely on a corpus of conversational MM that the author collected.  
In the second half of the book, the author discusses several experimental 
studies that he conducted to complement and confirm his corpus-based 
generalizations about MM focus-marking.  The author's primary goals are 
to characterize the ways in which focus is marked in MM; to give a general 
description of MM, with special attention to discourse particles and 
intonation; as a secondary goal, he compares two approaches to the study 
of language: a descriptive (corpus-based) approach and an experimental 
approach.

MM (also known as Minahasa Malay) is a variety of Malay spoken in and 
around the city of Manado, the capital of North Sulawesi, Indonesia.  MM 
has about 1 million native speakers, and differs phonologically, 
morphologically and syntactically from standard Indonesian.

DESCRIPTION

The book is divided into eight chapters.  The first four chapters are 
primarily descriptive, while the second four are experimental in nature.  
Extensive appendices have also been included.  The first appendix contains 
a sampling of passages from the corpus of data the author draws upon, 
while the remaining appendices detail the test conditions used in each of 
the ten experiments described in the second half of the book.

The first brief chapter outlines the goals of the book and provides 
information about the corpus of data used by the author.  The corpus 
consists of 23 dialogues, with a total duration of 144 minutes and a total 
size of nearly 24,000 words. There are 33 total participants in these 
dialogues, all university students. Recordings were digitized and 
transcribed by the author, and transcriptions were checked against the 
recordings with the assistance of native speaker informants.

Chapter Two, 'The structure of MM', contains a descriptive overview 
(descriptive in the sense that the overview is not couched within any 
particular brand of phonological, morphological or syntactic theory) of the 
phonology, morphology and syntax of MM, with frequent reference to the 
ways in which it differs from Standard Indonesian.  Aspects of MM structure 
that the author reviews in relatively greater detail include:
The distribution of MM's five productive prefixes (ba-, ta-, baku-, which 
form verbs; pang-, which forms nominals; and ka-, which forms ordinals 
from numerals) and the combinations in which these prefixes may co-occur.
The two reduplication patterns observed in MM, reduplication of the base 
and reduplication of the prefix.
The structure of each of the closed word classes in MM.
The structure of MM's two types of nominalized clauses.
The structure of clauses in combination, including relative clauses, 
complement clauses, adverbial clauses and coordinate clauses.
Certain clause-level syntactic processes, including sentence adverbs, cleft 
sentences, topicalization, negation, questions and imperatives, and 
interjections.

Chapter Three, 'Discourse particles', provides a more lengthy description of 
the set of discourse particles (DPs) observed in MM.  Following Goddard 
1998, Stoel defines DPs as 'words that are morphologically invariable, and 
express a speaker's immediate 'here-and-now' attitudes, thoughts and 
desires'.  DPs are an important discourse-related syntactic phenomenon in 
MM; according to Stoel's corpus, DPs constitute on average 11.3% of all 
words in spontaneous conversation.  DPs are fully integrated into the 
syntax of utterances, yet are unable to constitute utterances on their own; 
furthermore, any given utterance containing a DP would be equally 
grammatical without the DP.  MM DPs have two further defining properties: 
they only occur at the end of a syntactic phrase (which for the author is a 
somewhat disjunctive construct, namely a maximal projection or a verb 
phrase excluding all objects and adjuncts) and they never bear a focus-
marking accent. Stoel discusses in turn each of the 20 DPs observed in MM. 
Some DPs are quite frequent, while others are quite rare, with frequencies 
ranging from 218 instances in the corpus (for dang, roughly translatable 
as 'that is') to just a single instance. 
 
Chapter Four, 'Intonation', describes each of the major intonation patterns 
observed in MM.  Stoel proposes a model of intonation for MM which 
utilizes two kinds of prosodic constituents, IPs and PhPs.  IPs (intonational 
phrases) are composed of at least one PhP (phonological phrase), and are 
bounded by pauses. There are three types of basic patterns (declaratives, 
yes-no questions, and wh-questions), which may be accounted for with the 
same building blocks:  accents (on the final syllable of the PhP, which mark 
the focus), and edge tones (which mark the prosodic boundaries).  
Following an evaluation of these basic types, Stoel concludes that MM 
displays five 'intonational morphemes'.  Stoel also describes a handful 
of 'special' intonation patterns, which do not mark accent on the final 
syllable of the PhP and so cannot be accounted for with these building 
blocks: echo questions, the calling contour, exclamations, DPs, and polarity 
focus.

Stoel's overview of MM intonation is based mainly on read speech, although 
some examples were taken from the corpus of spontaneous dialogues.  
The discussion of intonation is limited to two domains, namely pitch (i.e. 
fundamental frequency) (to the exclusion of duration and loudness) and 
phonological intonation (to the exclusion of segmental structure and 
paralinguistic features).  Focus is marked in at least three (not mutually 
exclusive) ways:  pitch accent, word order, and with a DP.  Although there is 
only limited information available on Indonesian intonation patterns, there 
do appear to be some differences between MM intonation and that of 
Indonesian: e.g. MM has word-level stress, while Indonesian does not.

Chapter Five, 'Focus and constituent order', begins the experimental half of 
the book.  In this chapter, the author describes two experiments conducted 
to test the hypotheses drawn from the corpus regarding the interaction of 
focus and constituent order, and shows there is a relationship in MM, which 
on the surface appears to permit relatively free constituent order.  Focus is 
defined as the new or unpredictable information in a sentence, as in 
Lambrecht 1994.  Three kinds of focus are of interest:  predicate focus (V 
focus in intransitives/VO focus in transitives); sentence focus (SV focus in 
intransitives); and argument focus (S or O focus).  The author gathered 
acceptability judgments on sentences with different constituent orders and 
focus structures to contrast with and round out the findings of the 
naturalistic corpus.  

In these two experiments (Experiment 1 and 2), subjects were asked to 
provide categorial acceptability judgments on the answers of question-
answer pairs, which were then used to calculate a gradient mean of 
acceptability.  Between the two experiments, each possible constituent 
order/focus combination that was attested in the corpus was tested on 
forty speakers.  The author found that acceptability scores varied with 
respect to constituent order and focus (from a high of 97% for OSV word 
order/SV focus to a low of 38% for OSV word order/O focus), and that focus 
is an important factor in the relative acceptability of constituent orders 
(most importantly, initial O is only acceptable with non-O focus, and final S 
is unacceptable with S focus).  To account for the unacceptability of SOV, 
OVS and VSO orders, Stoel hypothesizes that SV(O) is the basic constituent 
order in MM, and alternate orders are derived by fronting O or VO.  The 
experimental results reveal some departures from the corpus: e.g. OSV 
order/S or SV focus is found to be 'fully acceptable', yet is barely attested in 
the corpus. 

Chapter Six, 'Focus and discourse particles', builds on earlier work of the 
author (Stoel 2000) and discusses five further experiments which consider 
the ways in which certain DPs - 'focus particles' - contribute to the focus 
structure of a sentence.  Stoel 2000 illustrated that three DPs - 'no' (roughly 
translatable as 'definitely'), 'sto' ('probably'), and 'to' ('I assume you
agree') - 
predictably follow the focus of the clause; in the first of the experiments of 
this chapter (Experiment 3), he attempts to replicate the results of Stoel 
2000 and show the same for two additional DPs, 'kata' ('it is said') and 'kwa?' 
('but').  In this experiment, as in Experiments 4 and 5, subjects were given a 
context sentence and asked to select the correct of two target sentences, 
which differed only according to the placement of the DP.  Experiment 3 
falsifies 2/3 of Stoel's 2000 claims, in showing that 'no' alone is a true 
focus-marking particle, in that it must follow the focus in all types of focus 
structures; 'sto', 'to' and 'kata?', on the other hand, may either be placed 
following the focus or the first prosodic phrase, while 'kwa?' must follow the 
first prosodic phrase.  Experiment 4 considers whether the 
notion 'following the first prosodic phrase' could be recast as 'second 
syntactic position', in which case these four DPs could be hypothesized to 
be second position clitics; Stoel concludes that this is not the case.  
Experiment 5 considers whether 'no' can occur within the predicate, or 
must follow the entire predicate; Stoel concludes that in only five of the ten 
focus/constituent order pairings considered was there a significant 
preference for 'no' to be in its expected position at the end of the focus 
domain.  Experiment 6a examines the interaction of 'no' with narrow focus 
(i.e. focus on a single word), which differs from other types of focus in MM 
by not being marked by an accent (which instead falls on the last word of 
the syntactic phrase, as defined above).  Subjects were asked to judge the 
acceptability of 'no' in sentence pairs where it was placed either following 
the narrow focus or the accent (i.e., sentence-finally).  In the corpus, there 
are no instances of 'no' following narrow focus; this experiment likewise 
provided no evidence that 'no' can mark narrow focus.  Experiment 6b 
further examines the interaction of 'no' and narrow focus, yielding results 
consistent of those of 6a.  

Chapter Seven, 'Focus and accent placement', explores the position of 
accent with respect to focus in declarative sentences in MM through three 
experiments, two production experiments (Experiments 7a and 7b) and 
one perception experiment (Experiment 8).  (Only the experiments in this 
chapter consider speech; the other experiments in the book consider MM 
only in its written form, although MM is not customarily written.)  The 
accent of the sentences in the corpus was determined both auditorily 
(impressionistically) and visually (using Praat), and Stoel determined that 
accent is most commonly on the last word of the clause, because most 
clauses have predicate focus.  Not all clauses in corpus have a final accent, 
indicating that MM has accent shift in case of, e.g., the final word (such as a 
DP) being unable to bear focus accent.

In Experiment 7a, 17 subjects (of which ten subjects' recordings proved 
usable) read aloud sentence pairs, with the context sentence determining 
the focus structure of the target sentence, five times apiece. For most of the 
13 focus/constituent order pairings tested, there appears to be a strong 
preference for accent upon the last word of the focus domain; Stoel 
concludes that accent placement is largely predictable from focus structure, 
and that every syntactic phrase that is part of a focus domain can attract an 
accent.  Experiment 7b considers four additional focus/constituent order 
pairings; from the results of the five subjects of 7b, Stoel concludes that 
accent must fall on the last word of a syntactic phrase.  Experiment 8 tested 
the hypothesis that hearers use focus accent to recognize the focus domain 
with respect to eight focus/constituent order pairings; in each condition, 
subjects listened to two sentence pairs differing only in position of accent 
in the target sentence, and chose the correct pair.  The materials were 
drawn from the 'best' examples of readings of each sentence pair by four 
native speakers of MM.  Stoel concludes that subjects prefer final accent in 
case of final focus, but have no clear preference for final or non-final 
accent in case of non-final focus.  

In the final chapter, Stoel reiterates his conclusions and proposes further 
research into information structure in MM that builds upon the preliminary 
conclusions proposed here.  In sum, there are three ways of marking focus 
in MM: syntactically (constituent order and cleft sentences formed with the 
relativizer 'yang'), the DP 'no', and accent.

CRITICAL EVALUATION

'Focus in Manado Malay' is a valuable addition to the body of literature 
describing Western Malayo-Polynesian languages, as well as to the body of 
literature seeking to characterize focus, intonation and DPs in general.  The 
book is written in a very clear style, and is well-organized, and benefits 
from copious amounts of data illustrating each point.  In the experimental 
half of the book, the author provides a large amount of statistics; these are 
generally easy to parse, and he admirably takes care to point out unnotable 
as well as notable results.  

As the book is primarily descriptive in nature (with the exception of Chapter 
Four, where Stoel utilizes the autosegmental theory of intonation as 
outlined in Ladd (1996)), it is immediately accessible to researchers 
working within all theoretical frameworks.  However, the descriptive 
orientation of the book is slightly disappointing, in that there are many 
interesting discourse-related syntactic, morphological and phonological 
phenomena which are intriguingly described yet receive no analytical 
treatment.  For example, Stoel characterizes the phrase 'tu dia' (a type of 
determiner) as not having 'any syntactic function, [although] it reinforces 
the casual atmosphere among speakers'; however, the distribution of the 
phrase - particularly where it cannot occur - remains to be accounted for 
syntactically.  A similar question can be raised with respect to MM's DPs. Of 
these. Stoel concludes, 'their frequent usage adds savor to the sentences of 
MM, and show that a language is more than a tool for expressing 
propositions' (p. 98). But what are the implications of this for a syntactic 
analysis of MM?  How can the distribution of DPs be accounted for 
syntactically?  Above all, the reader is left with the question of how, or 
whether, all of the focus-marking devices used in MM can be unified.  
Hopefully, this is a question that the author will address in future work on 
the information structure of MM.  

Overall, 'Focus in Manado Malay' has much to offer to researchers of 
Western Malayo-Polynesian languages, and will be a particularly useful 
resource to those with interests in information structure and the 
relationship between syntax, phonology and discourse.

REFERENCES

de Hoop, Helen & Ton van der Wouden, eds. (2000)  Linguistics in the 
Netherlands 2000.  Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Goddard, Cliff  (1998) Semantic analysis: a practical introduction.  New 
York: Oxford University Press.

Lambrecht, Knud  (1994) Information structure and sentence form: topic, 
focus and the mental representations of discourse referents.  Cambridge: 
Cambridge University Press.

Stoel, Ruben (2000) Discourse particles in Manado Malay.  In de Hoop and 
van der Wouden (2000), 185-198. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Catherine Fortin is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Linguistics at the 
University of Michigan.  Her research interests include the syntax, semantics 
and pragmatics of ellipsis in Indonesian.





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