A study of focus and accent in Singapore Malay

The syntactic focus-marking, like clefting, in Malay is limited to certain focus contexts. Hence, this motivates the belief that Malay adopts other strategies of focus-marking. Cross-linguistic research has provided ample evidence of intonation used as a focus-marking strategy, including Indonesian....

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Main Author: Diyana Hamzah
Other Authors: James Sneed German
Format: Final Year Project
Language:English
Published: 2012
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Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/10356/50856
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Institution: Nanyang Technological University
Language: English
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spelling sg-ntu-dr.10356-508562019-12-10T11:13:56Z A study of focus and accent in Singapore Malay Diyana Hamzah James Sneed German School of Humanities and Social Sciences DRNTU::Humanities::Language::Linguistics The syntactic focus-marking, like clefting, in Malay is limited to certain focus contexts. Hence, this motivates the belief that Malay adopts other strategies of focus-marking. Cross-linguistic research has provided ample evidence of intonation used as a focus-marking strategy, including Indonesian. Hence, this study aims to explore the relationship between focus and accent in Singapore Malay, and investigate if intonation is adopted as a possible strategy to mark focus. This study involved 12 Singaporean participants who are native speakers of Malay. They were recorded producing 20 target sentences, each corresponding to four focus conditions (i.e. all-focus, subject focus, verb-focus and VP-focus), presented in the discourse context of question-answer pairs. The F0 contours were visually inspected to identify the presence of accents. The findings suggest that an obligatorily accented subject and object are general characteristics of the intonation of Singapore Malay declaratives. There is a lack of one-to-one correspondence between focus and accent in Singapore Malay, thus further supporting its imperfect relationship, as evident in theories of focus and cross-linguistic research. This study suggests that intonation is a possible focus-marking strategy in Singapore Malay, and proposes a preliminary theory of focus to account for accenting patterns of the different contexts of focus. Bachelor of Arts 2012-11-22T03:52:27Z 2012-11-22T03:52:27Z 2012 2012 Final Year Project (FYP) http://hdl.handle.net/10356/50856 en Nanyang Technological University 46 p. application/pdf
institution Nanyang Technological University
building NTU Library
country Singapore
collection DR-NTU
language English
topic DRNTU::Humanities::Language::Linguistics
spellingShingle DRNTU::Humanities::Language::Linguistics
Diyana Hamzah
A study of focus and accent in Singapore Malay
description The syntactic focus-marking, like clefting, in Malay is limited to certain focus contexts. Hence, this motivates the belief that Malay adopts other strategies of focus-marking. Cross-linguistic research has provided ample evidence of intonation used as a focus-marking strategy, including Indonesian. Hence, this study aims to explore the relationship between focus and accent in Singapore Malay, and investigate if intonation is adopted as a possible strategy to mark focus. This study involved 12 Singaporean participants who are native speakers of Malay. They were recorded producing 20 target sentences, each corresponding to four focus conditions (i.e. all-focus, subject focus, verb-focus and VP-focus), presented in the discourse context of question-answer pairs. The F0 contours were visually inspected to identify the presence of accents. The findings suggest that an obligatorily accented subject and object are general characteristics of the intonation of Singapore Malay declaratives. There is a lack of one-to-one correspondence between focus and accent in Singapore Malay, thus further supporting its imperfect relationship, as evident in theories of focus and cross-linguistic research. This study suggests that intonation is a possible focus-marking strategy in Singapore Malay, and proposes a preliminary theory of focus to account for accenting patterns of the different contexts of focus.
author2 James Sneed German
author_facet James Sneed German
Diyana Hamzah
format Final Year Project
author Diyana Hamzah
author_sort Diyana Hamzah
title A study of focus and accent in Singapore Malay
title_short A study of focus and accent in Singapore Malay
title_full A study of focus and accent in Singapore Malay
title_fullStr A study of focus and accent in Singapore Malay
title_full_unstemmed A study of focus and accent in Singapore Malay
title_sort study of focus and accent in singapore malay
publishDate 2012
url http://hdl.handle.net/10356/50856
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