Syllable prominence in Unua

An acoustic study based on data from a collection of audio recordings of Unua (Malakula, Vanuatu) narratives found a lack of systematic distinctions of prominence in two-syllable lexemes. Duration, pitch and amplitude were marked variably on individual lexical items. However, a phrase-based analysis of seten ‘what’ versus seten go ‘what FOC’ showed higher pitch on the first syllable of the two-syllable sequence, but on the second syllable of the three-syllable sequence. The results of the study suggest that prominence in Unua is phrase-based and that it is manifested as higher pitch on the penultimate syllable of the phrase. These findings constitute an initial step towards more extended research on the prosodic characteristics of the language.