1 A phonetically-motivated model of intonational phonology in Singapore Malay Diyana Hamzah a,b, *, James S. German c *Corresponding author: diyana@ntu.edu.sg, +65 67904618 a Nanyang Technological University, Division of Linguistics and Multilingual Studies, Singapore b Temasek Laboratories, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore c Aix Marseille Univ, CNRS, LPL, Aix-en-Provence, France Abstract This paper presents original data in support of a new phonological model of intonation for the Malay variety spoken in Singapore. Adopting an approach grounded in Autosegmental- Metrical phonology, we propose that intonational contours in Malay can be explained in terms of underlying sequences of abstract tonal units (H and L) aligned to the edges and internal syllables of prosodic phrases organized in a hierarchy. Data is drawn from a series of production experiments involving declarative utterances in question-answer contexts, with additional manipulations of segmental composition, lexical structure and information structure (focus). Our results provide evidence for at least two levels of prosodic organization: (i) an Accentual Phrase, which bears a low (L) and high (H) tone at its right edge, and (ii) an intonational phrase, which bears an additional L tone at its right edge. A lexical constraint confines the L and H tones to be realized no earlier than the left edge of the utterance-final word. In narrow focus contexts, the timing properties of the focused peak and its preceding elbow supports the presence of a focus pitch accent L+H*, which triggers downstep in following F0 peaks. Keywords Singapore Malay, intonation, prosody, focus, tonal alignment, phrasing, final lengthening 1. Introduction The intonation contours manifested by a particular language are both highly systematic and also influenced by a wide range of factors including syntax, information structure, lexical structure, and segmental composition. Understanding the contribution of these factors is important not only from a descriptive standpoint, but also for discovering and characterizing the organization of the underlying phonological system. In this study, we present a series of speech production experiments designed to reveal the phonological organization of the intonation system of the variety of Malay spoken in Singapore. Given the importance of different levels of description, our experiments systematically explore how intonation patterns in declaratives are influenced by variation in segmental composition, lexical structure, and information structure (focus). A number of studies have shown that intonation contours, and in particular the timing of F0 events, are sensitive to the segmental composition of the underlying syllables, and these