Intonation
Most commonly, a rise-fall pitch movement occurs across the penultimate and final syllables of a phrase (van Zanten et al. 2003; Zuraidah et al. 2008). Here, we will consider the prominence on words that occur at the end of phrases in the passage, as well as words in the reading lists. We find a rise-fall pitch movement on words such as jubah [ˈdʒubah] ‘cloak’ and bersetuju [bɾ̩sˈtudʒʊ] ‘agree’ (where [ˈ] indicates the start of this rise-fall pitch movement). This can create an impression of penultimate word stress, something which is even more evident when words are uttered in isolation or in lists, as in items such as barang [ˈbaraŋ] ‘thing’ and tua [ˈtua] ‘old’ in the recording of words the table in the Section on the Consonant Example Words. In some cases, the penultimate vowel may be louder, while the final vowel is often lengthened, such as in nasi [ˈnasiː] ‘rice’ and hari [ˈhariː] ‘day’, a phenonmenon also reported by Zuraidah et al. (2008).
There is one exception to the above pattern: the vowel /ə/ is not normally given prominence, and where this vowel occurs in the penultimate syllable, the rise-fall pitch movement is usually confined to the phrase-final syllable. There are no examples of /ə/ in the penultimate syllable of a phrase-final word with a rise-fall pitch pattern in the reading of the passage, though, as mentioned above, there are several words with ellipsis of /ə/.
A different pitch movement, giving an impression of lexical stress on the final syllable of a word, is a rise at the end of a phrase, signalling perhaps ‘more is to come’. Examples from the passage include kuat [ˈkʰwat ̚] ‘strong’, bertiup [bɾ̩tiˈup ̚] ‘blow’ and jubahnya [dʒubahˈɲɐ] ‘his cloak’. It is common to find well-formed alternative realisations of these words with penultimate prominence, kuat [ˈku.at], bertiup [bɾ̩ˈti.ʊp] and jubahnya [dʒuˈbahɲɐ], and this variation is consistent with an absence of lexical stress in this variety. The occurrence of final prominence with a rising tone is also common in reading word lists, such as with bilik [biˈlek] 'room' and perang [peˈɾaŋ] ‘blonde’ in the recording of the list of vowels above.