SOAS Research Online

Abstract

With only one grammar describing the languages of Sonsorol-Tobi and only its phonetics, this dissertation focuses on describing prosodic patterns in Ramari Hatohobei, or Tobian, a severely endangered Micronesian language. The primary aim is to contribute to the description of Ramari Hatohobei based on data from the ELAR collection, “Documenting Ramari Hatohobei, the Tobian language, a severely endangered Micronesian language” (Black and Black, 2014). Another aim is to identify the extent to which such data could be useful for linguistic description and in particular to the field of phonology and phonetics. Spectrograms have been extracted using Praat from conversations, descriptions and stories and the ToBI conventions have been used for the analysis of prosodic patterns. Furthermore, the curators and speakers have been consulted in order to investigate particular hypotheses. Due to my personal interest in documenting Sonsorolese, a closely related language, this dissertation could potentially become an axis in distinguishing the different prosodic patterns between the two languages.