Lexical stress in Punjabi and its representation in PLS

Abstract

Punjabi is a tonal language and belongs to Indo-Aryan family of languages. Punjabi literature reveals that the suprasegmental phonemes such as Tone, Nasalization and stress are realized at the syllable level. There is abundance of geminated words in which stress Co-occurs on the geminated consonant. The disyllabic words have highest frequency of occurrence. There are very few quadrisyllabic/polysyllabic words excluding borrowed words. There is limited work available on Punjabi generative phonology. Initial efforts were made however no conclusive work on linguistic rules for stress is available. Pronunciation lexicon development is a very useful resource for machine learning and is critical for speech technology research. Pronunciation lexicon specification (PLS) of W3C enables development of such data in standard XML format. This PLS data ought to be enriched with stress information encoded in IPA so that the Punjabi Text-to-Speech systems can use it to deliver near natural voice. An attempt has been made in this paper to study Non-tonal disyllabic words for identifying stress patterns. The data was further analyzed to define linguistic contexts in which stress occurs in Punjabi disyllabic words.