Oor die onstabiele klemtoongedrag van Afrikaanse reduplikasies

Abstract

This is a report on an investigation into the stress behaviour of Afrikaans reduplications in terms of preference for which member is stressed. Previous studies of Afrikaans either maintain that the two members of reduplications are identically stressed (Botha, 1988; Combrink, 1990; Conradie, 2004; De Villiers, 1983; Kempen, 1962, 1969; Ponelis, 1993; Raidt, 1981; Scholtz, 1963), or that the first member predominantly receives stress (Van Huyssteen & Wissing, 2007). The experiment from which the findings are deduced entails the analysis of 841 vowels (all of them the phoneme /A/) read in twenty-one reduplications by six Afrikaans-speaking persons, three of each gender. The reduplications were embedded in a set of carrier sentences and another set of natural sentences, all of them in comparable sentence accent positions. Participants first had to read a block of carrier sentences, then a block consisting of natural sentences, and finally a repetition of the first block of carrier sentences. In the case of all six, the readers’ reduplications in natural sentences mainly received stress on the first member, which is a corroboration of the findings of Van Huyssteen and Wissing (2007). In contrast to this, some readers (three of the six) preferred second-syllable stress when it came to carrier sentences. Noteworthy is that these readers thus exhibited a strange pattern of mainly stressing the second syllables in the first block of readings (i.e. carrier sentences); then switched to first syllables in the second block (natural sentences), and returned to stressing second syllables in the third block of readings (again carrier sentences). The other three exhibited a diverse pattern, albeit in all cases in a  ystematic way. In the present study it clearly emerged that stress assignment in reduplications is largely sensitive to the type of reading task being used. This, of course, spells caution for not too easily jumping to conclusions based on one mode type only, as done by Van Huyssteen and Wissing (2007). This could very well be the case in other, related studies as well. The results have shown positively that both inter- and intra-personal command of stress placement in reduplications are to be taken into consideration. In view of the abovementioned findings of this study, the unstable character of reduplications in Afrikaans seems to be apparent. This is in sharp contrast to the very steady pattern of stress placement in Afrikaans reduplications. This, perhaps, is the most convincing evidence in favour of acknowledging reduplications as a grammatical construction type, separate from compounds, for instance – at least in the case of Afrikaans. Finally, the use of auditory cues in stress placement judgement correlated highly with acoustic measurements, which could serve as strong support for this working method.

Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies 2010, 28(1): 13–23