Intonation?

[vanderso at hawaii.edu]

Dear Austronesianists,

May I ask for your collective advice?  I'm a new assistant professor of Linguistics (since Aug 2000) at the Univ. of Hawai’i at Manoa.  Austronesian is an area that’s new to me.  I’m wondering if anyone has any leads on detailed phonological or phonetic investigations into intonation in Austronesian languages.  A web search (of 530 intonation references in journals) has so far revealed only one reference:

Emmorey, K. 1984.  The intonation system of Toba Batak.  In P. Schachter (Ed.), Studies in the Structure of Toba Batak, 37--58.  UCLA Occasional Papers in Linguistics, Number 5.

This summer I hope to begin analyzing Hawaiian Creole English and Hawaiian language corpora, using what has become a dominant paradigm for intonation research:  Pierrehumbert’s phonological framework and an associated transcription system, ToBI (Tones and Break Indices.)  The HCE work fits into a growing body of work in the ToBI framework on types of English (e.g.:  http://www.vuw.ac.nz/lals/WAVEip/)    Following this, beginning with Hawaiian I would like to start a research program into Polynesian languages (or depending what work may be out there, on Philippine or Malay.  There is a Sasak language tutorial site which includes intonation at: http://www.arts.unimelb.edu.au/general/projects/field/GROUPS/GROUP_B/tutorial.html).

Thanks very much.  Any leads will be much appreciated.

Sincerely yours,

Victoria Anderson
Assistant Professor of Linguistics
University of Hawai'i at Manoa
vanderso at hawaii.edu
956-5830