14 May 2002

Elinor Keane (Oxford University)

Recent advances in the study of stress and its phonetic manifestations have taken little account of the Dravidian languages. In the case of Tamil, very little experimental work has been conducted and no consistent phonetic correlates identified, nor has there even been a firm consensus on the location of stress at either the lexical or sentence level. This paper describes the application of acoustic analysis, which has produced the first experimental confirmation of phonetic differences associated with rhythmic prominence in Tamil. Measurements of vowel duration and quality were made for sets of sentences recorded during fieldwork in south India. Analysis of these data revealed statistically significant differences correlated with syllable position, strongly suggesting that lexical stress in Tamil is fixed on the initial syllable. Finally, some implications of these findings for timing in Tamil and also the function of rhythmic prominence in the language are explored.

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