Aspects of the prosody of Kuot, a language where intonation ignores stress (1).

Abstract

This article describes the basic system of intonation and lexical stress in Kuot, a non-Austronesian language of New Ireland, Papua New Guinea. Kuot employs pitch ([F.sub.0] variation) primarily to express structural information about the clause. Some intonation contours express Junctions that are commonly expressed by intonation crosslinguistically, such as final vs. nonfinal clauses and parts of clauses, and yes/no questions. In addition, Kuot has particular contours (or tunes) for question-word questions and negated sentences.

Word stress, on the…