Information structure and intonational accent in Burmese

It tends to be assumed that tonal languages do not make use of intonational tones and accent location for the purpose of conveying information structural aspects of the utterance. This study of read-aloud stories in colloquial Burmese shows that this tonal language does resort to this sort of intonational means for information-structuring reasons. The prosody of Burmese exhibits identifiable intonational patterns, which function on the level of accentual phrases. An accentual phrase constitutes the basic prosodic unit, and it is there that we find the real interaction of information structure, intonation and tone. Accentual phrases are organised around a single accent, the location of which depends on information structural factors. Sentences can consist of a single accentual phrase or a few phrases, while the exact partition into such phrases is also motivated by information- and discourse-structuring considerations.

Asian Pacific Rim

This chapter describes the prosodic systems of Japanese and Korean, the two major languages spoken in the Asian Pacific Rim. It covers both lexical and post-lexical prosody of these languages, with the main focus on word accent and intonation. As for word accent, Japanese and Korean both exhibit various pitch accent systems ranging from those with multiple accent patterns to those in which pitch plays no distinctive role at the lexical level. The intonation systems of these two languages are also diverse, ranging from those with purely phrasal or boundary tones to those where intonational tones are constrained by lexical pitch accent patterns. However, both languages have an accentual phrase as the smallest prosodic unit defined by intonation. Similarities and differences between the prosodic systems of these two languages, including various regional dialects in each language, are analysed in the framework of the autosegmental-metrical model of intonational phonology.