[TACOL] Emily GASSER │ “A Preliminary Description of Wamesa Lexical Stress”, 09 octobre 2025
La prochaine séance de notre séminaire TACOL aura lieu le jeudi 09 octobre 2025 à 14h30, sur place (salle de réunion 311, Campus CNRS de Villejuif) et sur Zoom.

Nous aurons le plaisir de recevoir et d’écouter Emily GASSER (Swarthmore College).
Titre de la présentation :
“A Preliminary Description of Wamesa Lexical Stress”
Résumé :
Wamesa [wad], spoken by approximately 5000 people in Northwest New Guinea, belongs to the South Halmahera-West New Guinea (SHWNG) branch of the Austronesian language family. This paper describes the phonetics and phonology of lexical stress in Wamesa. Aside from a brief description of Wamesa stress by Gasser (2014) , no phonetic descriptions of stress realization in the eastern SHWNG languages yet exists. Work by Kaland (2018; 2019) describes the phonetics of stress in Papuan Malay, an areal lingua franca with which Wamesa is in contact, and Remijsen (2001) and Arnold (2018) have described intonational phonetics, including stress, in Raja Ampat languages.
Wamesa stress may fall anywhere in the last three syllables of the word, though it is most often found on the penultimate syllable. Phonological enclitics, including determiners, can cause stress to shift rightwards in two environments. If underlying stress falls on the antepenultimate syllable, addition of an enclitic will shift it to the final root syllable, while the underlyingly stressed syllable is realized with secondary stress, as in (1). In roots with no underlying stress, primary surface stress is assigned by default to the penultimate syllable, but a following enclitic will shift it to the root-final syllable, as in (2), though compare (3) with underlying penultimate stress and no shift. The enclitics themselves can never bear stress.
1) /apaˈrapiri/ → [ˌa.pa.ˈra.pi.ri] ‘gnat’, [ˌa.pa.ˌra.pi.ˈri=paj] ‘the gnat’
2) /dia/ → [ˈdi.a] ‘fish’, [di.ˈa=paj] ‘the fish’
3) /ˈwona/ → [ˈwo.na] ‘dog’, [ˈwo.na=paj] ‘the dog’
Secondary stress is assigned either to alternating syllables leftwards from the primary stress or to the initial syllable, depending on the word. In some words where these conflict, variation is possible, as with [ˌsi.βe.re.ˈrej] ~ [si.ˌβe.re.ˈrej] ‘star’.
Following Kaland (2019), a phonetic study was done to characterize the phonetic correlates of stress in Wamesa. Because words spoken in isolation or in repeated carrier phrases are subject to confounding influences from phrasal and contrastive stress, words were measured from a six-minute recording of an origin myth, as told by a female Wamesa speaker in her 60’s. Individual segments were aligned within the transcribed recording with the Montreal Forced Aligner (McAuliffe et al. 2017) . Alignments were hand-corrected and syllable boundaries were added and annotated for stress. The final two syllables of each intonational phrase were discarded as they are most likely to bear phrasal accents, as were Indonesian loan words, words with exaggerated prosody, disfluencies, any syllables with laughter or other issues which might disrupt acoustic measurements, and syllables with secondary stress. This left 496 syllables, including 193 syllables with primary stress and 303 which were unstressed. Several features of each annotated syllable were measured automatically in Praat (Boersma & Weenink 2025) .
When controlling for the presence of onsets and codas, the nuclei of stressed syllables were significantly longer than those of unstressed syllables (p < 0.001) under a linear mixed effect analysis using the lme4 package in R (R Core Team 2025; Bates et al. 2015) . The F0 of stressed syllables were significantly higher than those of unstressed syllables in the same word (1-tailed t-test; t=3.360025, p=.000479), though the absolute value of the difference in Hz is quite small, raising questions about perceptibility. Other measures, including relative intensity, vowel formants, pitch rise vs. fall, and spectral tilt, were not significantly different in stressed vs unstressed syllables.
Réferences :
Arnold, Laura. 2018. A Grammar of Ambel: An Austronesian language of Raja Ampat, west New Guinea. University of Edinburgh.
Bates, Douglas, Martin Mächler, Ben Bolker & Steve Walker. 2015. Fitting Linear Mixed-Effects Models Using lme4. Journal of Statistical Software 67(1). 1–48.
https://doi.org/10.18637/jss.v067.i01.
Boersma, Paul & David Weenink. 2025. Praat: Doing phonetics by computer [computer program].
Gasser, Emily. 2014. Windesi Wamesa Morphophonology. Yale University.
Kaland, Constantijn. 2018. Spectral tilt as a correlate of Papuan Malay word stress. In Speech Prosody 2018, 339–343. ISCA. https://doi.org/10.21437/SpeechProsody.2018-69.
Kaland, Constantijn. 2019. Acoustic correlates of word stress in Papuan Malay. Journal of
Phonetics 74. 55–74. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wocn.2019.02.003.
McAuliffe, Michael, Michaela Socolof, Sarah Mihuc, Michael Wagner & Morgan Sonderegger.
2017. Montreal Forced Aligner: Trainable Text-Speech Alignment Using Kaldi. In Proc.
Interspeech 2017, 498–502. https://doi.org/10.21437/Interspeech.2017-1386.
R Core Team. 2025. R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing. Vienna, Austria: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. https://www.R-project.org/.
Remijsen, Bert. 2001. Word-prosodic systems of Raja Ampat languages. Leiden: Universiteit Leiden.
Pour toute demande d’information, merci de contacter Lameen Souag
OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Balthazar Do Nascimento (1 octobre 2025). [TACOL] Emily GASSER │ “A Preliminary Description of Wamesa Lexical Stress”, 09 octobre 2025. LES CARNETS DU LACITO. Consulté le 22 janvier 2026 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/14tn1
