Word Stress and Phrasal Intonation in Addis Ababa Amharic

Analyses of word-level stress in Amharic have been inconsistent since early grammars of the language were written, with little consensus amongst the authors. While some claim that there is no consistent and systematic assignment of stress, others propose weight-based analyses. Data were collected from a native Amharic speaker who was presented with words and sentences in English; acoustic measurements were performed to evaluate pitch. This study presents a proposal of word-level stress in Addis Ababa Amharic based on phonetic analysis that directly contests the analyses of previous authors to varying degrees. The findings show that there is word-level stress, and that it may be predictably assigned based on the shape and category of a word. This study also proposes a model of intonational phonology of Amharic declarative phrases based on the Autosegmental-Metrical framework. The data show that although Amharic has lexical stress, it patterns with Farasani Arabic in that declarative phrases show no pitch accent; the role of stress in these phrasal contexts is suppressed. As such, in neutral focus, most words constitute an Accentual Phrase (AP), demarcated by a low tone (L) on the left edge, and a high tone (Ha) on the right edge