Word prominence in polysynthetic Australian languages: Bininj Gun-wok, Ngalakgan and Murrinhpatha

This chapter summarises prosodic constituency and prominence in three polysynthetic languages of northern Australia: Bininj Gun-wok, Ngalakgan and Murrinhpatha. The relationship of prosody to morphosyntactic integration, i.e. ‘wordhood’, is also discussed. In all three languages, the main form of prosodic prominence is pitch accent, which is anchored to stressed syllables. Bininj Gun-wok and Ngalakgan are characterised by multiple prosodic constituents within the polysynthetic verb, potentially anchoring multiple accents. Considerable variation is attested in accentual placement. Murrinhpatha verbs, by contrast, integrate all stem elements into a single prosodic word constituent, though some suffixes are external to this. Murrinhpatha prosodic words have fixed penultimate stress, though only the right-most word in a phrase receives accentuation.