ISMIL 7  Nijmegen, The Netherlands, 27-29 June 2003  |  ISMIL Home  
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Malay Intonation Revisited
Indirawati Zahid
Academy of Malay Studies
University of Malaya
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
indirawati@um.edu.my

This paper is about the prospect of rewriting Malay intonation. Thus description has yet to be discussed in a deeper, theoretical and experimental manner. Preliminary works about these were done by Asraf (1981) and Hashim Musa (1974) and were based on impressionistic phonetics. This paper will necessarily try to discuss the intonation of Malay language based on autosegmental theory and with the help of Praat programme to visualize the intonation contours. The description of tone movements in this analysis will use the first 2 initial tone movements regardless the diacritics symbols employed such as the using of "+" symbol for steep movements and the duration. The hypotheses of this paper are i). Malay language has varied intonation contours for each sentence; ii) Malay language has varied intonation contours to convey emotion meanings and (iii) there exist close and neat correspondences between intonation contours and the emotions. Using contextual data of Malay films, Sembilu 1 & 2, 107 data utterances consisting of 53 declaratives, 19 imperatives, 16 questions and 19 question Qwhs were analyzed. To get the close-copy of intonation contours for the utterances and the label of emotions, perception tests were rendered. The respondents of the perception tests were Malay native speakers aged between 18-32 years old. For the emotion label tests, the respondents were given the list of 9 emotions. They were asked to listen to the audio data and label the utterances according to the 9 emotions in the list or if they have any other emotion that they can think of to be more appropriate for the data, they are allowed to add in. And for the close-copy tests, respondents were given 4 choices, i). accurate; ii). acceptable; iii) not sure and iv). do not know. The amounts of the stimuli for close-copy tests are 504 stimuli. All the descriptions of the analysis were generated from what I called as Modified Intonation Model (MIM). The findings of this analysis prove all the 3 hypotheses. The analysis shows that in Malay language the most frequent tone movements were %HL for the initial movements and L% for the final. And these findings also have proven the research done by Amran Halim (1969) for bahasa Indonesia though Amran Halim didn't include emotions as part of his analysis and that of Mozziconacci's. (1998).

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