UCLA

This thesis introduces a preliminary model of Malagasy intonational phonology under the framework of Autosegmental-Metrical phonology. The data covers declarative and interrogative sentences (yes/no and wh-), produced by five Malagasy speakers from the central highlands of Madagascar. The results show that Malagasy has two prosodic units marked by intonation: the Intermediate Phrase (ip) and the Intonational Phrase (IP). The ip corresponds to major syntactic constituents such as the predicate and the subject and is demarcated with a rising pitch accent (L+