Prosodic features and intonation patterns

Stress in Bislama is not predictable. Although this means that stress is phonemically contrastive, I am not aware of any pair of lexical items which differ in meaning solely by the position of stress. However, there are words in Bislama in which stress appears on the initial syllable in words of very similar phonotactic shape, e.g. /nákamal/ ‘meeting house’, /kálabus/ ‘prison’, /píkinini/ ‘child’, the second syllable, e.g. /novémba/ ‘November’, /nabáŋga/ ‘banyan’, the third syllable, e.g. /demonstrésen/ ‘demonstration’, /nakatámbol/ ‘dragon plum’, and even words in which stress appears on the final syllable, e.g. /lakaskát/ ‘waterfall’.

It probably makes more sense to subdivide the vocabulary of Bislama into its etymological source languages, treating English, French and Melanesian etyma separately. Words originating from local vernaculars behave overwhelmingly according to the pattern that we find in Oceanic languages whereby stress is systematically applied to the penultimate syllable. This would therefore account for the position of stress in words such as /nabáŋga/ ‘banyan’ and /nakatámbol/ ‘dragon plum’ presented above. Following widespread vernacular patterns, a diphthong in a final closed syllable is also stressed in Bislama, e.g. /namaláus/ ‘Garuga floribunda’. Where two syllables have been historically reduplicated, the second element does not count for syllable-counting purposes, meaning that stress is found on the penultimate syllable of the unreduplicated root, e.g. /napíripiri/ ‘sea hearse tree’, /nadúledule/ ‘red silkwood’.

However, the generalizations just presented represent strong tendencies in Bislama rather than exceptionless rules, and some forms of vernacular origin exhibit stress patterns which vary from these. In some cases, we find that the initial syllable is stressed, e.g. /námarai/ ‘eel’, /nákamal/ ‘meeting house’, while in other cases the second syllable is stressed, e.g. /namáriu/ ‘acacia tree’. These irregularities are unlikely to derive from divergent patterns in the substrate language, so there seems to have been a genuine unpredictable shift of stress in these cases.

Forms of French origin are often found with stress on the final syllable, which is what we would expect given the ultimate-syllable stress pattern of the source language. Thus: /glasóŋ/ ‘ice block’, /restoróŋ/ ‘restaurant’, /limonát/ ‘soft drink (< limonade)’, /maratóŋ/ ‘running shoes (< marathon)’. However, final stress in words of French origin is again not universal, and we do find forms in which stress has shifted, e.g. /kálsoŋ/ ‘(men’s) underpants’, /pétoŋ/ ‘French bowls (< pétanque)’, /bóndi/ ‘criminal (< bandit)’.

Finally, we have the English-derived bulk of the lexicon. Unlike French and the Melanesian languages, stress is not predictable in English, and this unpredictability is mirrored in words of English origin in Bislama. For the most part, the position of stress in Bislama can be deduced from the position of stress in English, e.g. /pálamen/ ‘parliament’, /haibískis/ ‘hibiscus’, /demonstrésen/ ‘demonstration’.

One feature of Bislama that is immediately obvious to even a new learner of the language is its intonation pattern. Not only is the primary intonation pattern of Bislama clearly different from that of English and the various vernacular languages, but it is also quite distinct from what we find in mutually intelligible Solomons Pijin and Papua New Guinea Tok Pisin. In talking about Bislama intonation, it is difficult (for the present writer at least) to go beyond vague impressions, but there does seem to be a substantially greater rise towards the end of a statement, followed by a much more noticeable drop immediately afterwards at the end of the statement than we find in any of the other languages (or varieties of Melanesian Pidgin) to which I have just referred. This gives the impression that Bislama has something of a “sing-song” intonation. My only suggestion for a possible source for this intonation is that it may reflect a French source, though this is little more than an impression which would need to be verified by checking against a detailed empirical comparison of the intonation patterns of both languages.

The amount of descriptive material relating to Bislama has increased substantially since the 1970s, and we now have a fairly comprehensive published dictionary (Crowley 1995), as well as quite detailed discussions of particular aspects of the grammar, but there is still no publicly available grammar of the language. Matters of phonology have typically also been covered briefly (or not at all) in published material relating to Bislama. As far as I know, the only published statement of any kind relating to stress in Bislama, brief as this may be. There has also been no acoustic verification of the set of phonemic contrasts postulated for Bislama, and has – albeit somewhat tentatively – presented a number of specific suggestions regarding areas that might be worthy of investigation. Finally, of course, there is a real need to follow up the suggestion in the preceding paragraph regarding the need for a comparative study of Bislama intonation patterns.