Document Type
Article
Abstract
The present paper is based on a study conducted following Balasubramanian’s (1981) method: a native speaker was asked to emphasize a given item in a sentence and instrumental measurements were made as to which phonetic cues the speaker used to accomplish that task. While Balasubramanian asserted that emphasis is marked mainly by an increased length of certain segments, the findings in the present paper indicate that Tamil emphasis is marked by a combination of several phonetic correlates. Some of the confusion about Tamil stress arises from a failure by several authors to distinguish clearly between word-level stress, sentence-level emphasis, and intonational effects (Christdas 1988:185). In this paper, stress will refer to word-level stress, while sentence-level emphasis will simply be called emphasis. Only emphasis in Tamil will be discussed.
Disciplines
Linguistics | Social and Behavioral Sciences
Publication Date
1-1-1994
Language
English
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Vinton, James E. 1994. Phonetic emphasis in Tamil. UTA Working Papers in Linguistics 1.95-107.