Melodic structure in Toba Batak and Betawi Malay word prosody

Abstract

"In languages with word stress, one (and only one) syllable is perceived by native listeners of the language as stronger than the other syllables in the same word. On the higher levels, in phrases or sentences, accent is used to make particular words more prominent than other words. In stress languages, the sentence accent typically coincides with the word stress. Languages without word stress may also use accent to highlight words in sentences but then the sentence accent is not restricted to a particular syllable in the word. Indonesian has been claimed to be one such language (van Heuven & van Zanten 1997; van Zanten, Goedemans & Pacilly 2003)"