Pausing strategies and prosodic boundaries in Dalabon

Abstract

Earlier impressionistic analyses of Dalabon indicate that the grammatical word is often realized as either an accentual phrase, or an intonational phrase, followed by a pause. Unusually, it can also be interrupted by a silent pause, with each section being realized as separate intonational phrases. Our results support these earlier impressions, although this use of the silent pause appears to be restricted to certain affix boundaries, and other phonological constraints relating to the following linguistic material.