Abstract
There is no consensus in the location and the acoustic cue of word-level stress in Mongolian. That Mongolian has a word-initial stress-accent system (Cinggeltei 1991), a word-final pitch-accent system (Bobrovnikov 1849: 33), or a quantity-sensitive stress-accent system (Poppe 1970: 47) have been proposed in previous literature. Recently, the very existence of word-level stress in Mongolian is doubted (Karlsson 2006, 2014).
This study aims to examine the word prosody of an understudied dialect, Khorchin Mongolian (KM). Three speakers were involved in the experiment. Target words, compounds, and phrases were filled into three types of carrier sentences, in order to elicit words in pre-focus, in-focus, and post-focus positions.
The result shows that in KM, head prominence is probably manifested through pitch accent. The H tone is obligatorily assigned to word-final syllable across all types of focus conditions, and the metrical head is culminatively enhanced in higher-level phrasal prosody.
