"Stress" (Was: kalabaw)

[Olli Salmi]

At 19:42 +0200 5.12.2000, Waruno Mahdi wrote:

>The other reason is because, as already the length of your query aptly
>demonstrates, an adequate answer (assuming I were phonolgist enough to
>risk making one) would guarantee getting me kicked out of the mailing list
>for overexerting all limits of mailer capacities.

Thank you very much for your reply. I don't want to cause your expulsion.

>There is the problem of nature of the stress, which is different depending
>(a.o.!!) on which part of Indonesia or Malaysia the speaker comes from,
>and for which I'd have to be a phonologist to even describe one of the
>countless dialect varieties.

Personally I'd prefer Peninsular Malay as a point of departure, because I'd
imagine it has the least substrate or adstrate influence. Then one could
build upon that, adding or removing distinctions. I'm not aware of any
publication on intonation or phrasal stress in Peninsular Malay except
Hendon and very few on Indonesian. I've seen no references to a pitch peak
in the middle of a compound, but then again it's hard to come by any
publications here.

>Then there's the problem of place of stress, which is likewise dependent
>from where the speaker comes from, his social and ethnic background, etc.
>But at least I can give some opinion as non-phonologist. In pronouncing
>an isolated word, a Toba Batak speaking Indonesian Malay typically places
>the stress on the penultimate, while a Javanese typically places it on the
>ultimate, whereas the "standard", produced by well-trained school teachers
>for Bahasa Indonesia or radio moderators, has what I described for "nuclear
>Malay" (because it is ostentatively the way it is in "Mainland"-Riau,
>that's the part of Riau on the island of Sumatra), i.e. on the ultimate if
>the penultimate vowel is schwa, and otherwise on the penultimate. All other
>dialects one could probably describe in terms of these three varieties,
>i.e mostly ultimate, mostly penultimate, or sometimes the one somtimes the
>other (I use "mostly" only to avoid being possibly confronted by exceptions
>if I say "always").

Ebing used Riau speakers as a test group. He got slightly clearer
judgements with them than with a mixed group of Indonesians, but they were
still remarkably tolerant. I wonder if Malaysians are equally tolerant.

The "mostly" cases are not problematic, it's the rarer cases. However, I
think the choices that a speaker of a given dialect faces are finite.

>That was for isolated words. The moment you have a sentence, then, again
>depending on what part of the country you come from, there can be varyingly
>strong suppression of word stress by sentence intonation, which can
>involve shifting the main stress from ultimate to penultimate and vice
>versa, splitting the stress in a main and secondary stress, not to mention
>specific tonal modulation which can on one hand traverse a wide range of
>tones in various melodious profiles, or also completely suppress tonality
>and render part of the sentence a monotonous almost garbled string of
>compressed syllables.

It seems to be that the so called word stress is just the stress of an
isolated word, which means it's a sentence final phrase stress. This is
Halim's view, if memory doesn't fail me.

I presume secondary stress is the lengthening of the penultimate before a
stressed ultimate, which Hendon calls clarity accent in "The Phonology and
Morphology of Ulu Muar Malay".

>So strictly speaking, Indonesians are accustomed to the widest varieties
>of stressing, and therefore quite lenient there, as long as you don't shift
>the stress further to the front than the penultimate. So, to make clear
>that you are a foreigner, just stress some words e.g. on the antepenultimate.
>Luckily, there are no stress minimal pairs in Indonesian Malay, and the only
>way to get  misunderstood is by applying a wrong sentence intonation, like
>you mean to ask a question and the listener takes it to be a proposition.
>But that's a mishap which can sometimes also happen between indigenous
>speakers from different corners of the country (if that's any consolation).
>
>Hope I haven't discouraged you from pressing on with your study :-)

Well, I've been discouraged for quite a while. I do this for fun and it's
not fun listening to tapes and finding a lot of exceptions to the patterns
you thought existed. I've been lurking on this list and the Bahasa list in
the hope of getting some morsels of information.

A further question I've been wondering about is poetry amd metrics. Is
there a traditional way of reciting or singing pantuns or children's rhymes
so that the beat falls on a particular syllable? I've tried to listen to
dangdut over the Web, and I've heard beats on both the final and
penultimate syllable. This might be totally irrelevant to what I've called
stress, because the pitch movements may be intonation although I hear them
as accent or stress.

All the best,
Olli Salmi