A corpus-based approach to Cebuano verb accent
Chihkai Lin
Volume
53
Issue
NA
Pages
-
1
16
Date of publication:
December 31, 2022
This paper uses a corpus-based approach to re-examine verb accent in Cebuano, an Austronesian language spoken in the Central Philippines. This paper establishes a corpus based on Luzares’s (1979) wordlist of Cebuano verbs and analyzes the accent and syllable types of 1185 words without affixation. The results show that the accent falls on the penultimate syllable in 74% of the corpus data and on the final syllable in 26%. The accents vary depending on the structures of the penultimate syllable: the accent remains on the penultimate syllable when it has a CVC structure; meanwhile, when the penultimate syllable has a CV structure, vowel height of the final syllable might show gradient correlation in accent shift.