123 Quantitative investigation of intonation in an endangered language. 1 SAM HELLMUTH 1 , FRANK KÜGLER 2 & RUTH SINGER 3 University of York 1 , Universitä t Potsdam 2 & Radboud University Nijmegen 3 1. INTRODUCTION Mawng is a non-Pama-Njungan language of Australia (Singer 2006a) of the Iwaidjan language family. It is spoken by around 300 people and is still being acquired by children. In Mawng, the presence of an intonational pitch accent on a word does not by itself indicate information status, since, in general, all nouns and verbs bear a pitch accent. However the use of steep pitch excursions in contexts of contrastive focus, as observed by Singer (2006b), suggest that a ‘special pitch accent’ is available as one means of encoding focus in Mawng. This is illustrated in Figure 1 which shows a ‘special focus accent’ on the word warrwak [] ‘behind’, with ‘neutral’ accents on all other content words. The focus accent usually marks a contrastive focus (as in this example which occurs in a sequence of locative descriptions in which the man was previously positioned in front of the tree), but is also observed in non-contrastive focal contexts (such as introduction of a new referent to discourse). 2 Figure 1 Example of „focus accent‟ on warrwak (mph-rs-1-39-9-1). 1 We are indebted to the Mawng speakers for their contribution to this work. This research was supported by Sonderforschungsbereich 632 Project D2 ‘Typology of Information Structure’ at the University of Potsdam (funded by the DFG), by the University of Melbourne and by the Australian Research Council grant 'Reciprocals across languages' awarded to Prof. Nicholas Evans. Ruth Singer would like to thank Bruce Birch, Janet Fletcher and Yiya Chen for useful discussions of Mawng prosody. The authors would like to thank Andreas Pankau and Kathi Moczko for their help in reformatting the data in the elicited dataset. 2 It is not the only means available to indicate focus in Mawng, which also employs word order variation and (to some extent) an emphatic marker (‘pa’), see Singer (2007 in preparation). warlk kamalangali la warr.wak ki.la.nga.li ja arrarrkpi tree PR.3VE-stand-NP part behind PR-3MA-stand-NP art man (I see) a tree standing, and the man is behind. 100 250 150 200 Time (s) 0 3.09217