Syntactically-Governed Accentuation in Balinese

In Balinese there is a consistency of alignment between F0 peaks and particular syntactic positions such as "final syllable of the head of the phrase" or "final syllable of the phrase." This becomes apparent from F0 measurements taken from sentences recorded from a Balinese speaker which include measurements from sentences with different syntactic constructions and different length words in each syntactic position. Thus, the placement of F0 peaks in Balinese is not distinctive and in fact, there is no word-level accentuation in Balinese. Rather, placement of F0 peaks occurs at the phrasal level and hence serves a delimitative function.Funding for this project was provided by an NSF Graduate Student Fellowship Research Allowance