A Typology of Stress, And Where Malay/Indonesian Fits In

The position of lexical stress in Malay/Indonesian has traditionally been described in at least three different ways: (a) always penultimate (eg. Amran 1984); (b) always final (eg. van Ophyysen 1915); and (c) penultimate, except when the penult is a schwa, in which case it is final (eg. Kähler 1956). In a couple of recent papers, Tadmor (1999, 2000) provides an extensive survey of these various descriptions, and argues that the differences are due, at least in part, to different authors describing different regional or sociolinguistic varieties of Malay/Indonesian. In addition, however, he proposes, for some varieties of Malay/Indonesian, yet a fourth description of the facts, to the effect that lexical stress is simply absent. A similar description, denying the existence of lexical stress, is also proposed for other varieties of Malay/Indonesian in Gil (2003, 2006). Building on the studies by Tadmor and Gil, this paper argues that the true picture of lexical stress in Malay/Indonesian is actually more complex than suggested in previous work. Specifically, for the description of a given language variety, it is not sufficient simply to state whether it has lexical stress, and, if it has, on which syllable it falls. Instead, this paper proposes a universal typology of lexical stress, providing a descriptive framework within which the lexical stress of individual language varieties, Malay/Indonesian or other, may be characterized. The typology consists of six characteristic features. First, within a given language, there may be more than one stress system, each with its own distinctive properties. This yields the first parameter of the typology