Lexical Tone in Metnyo Ambel

In this paper, I outline the tone system of the Metnyo dialect of Ambel, an endangered Austronesian language spoken in the Raja Ampat archipelago in east Indonesia. The tone system of Metnyo Ambel is binary and privative: /H/ syllables contrast with toneless syllables. I will present data from monosyllabic and polysyllabic words, as well as words of varying morphological complexity, to show that tone is culminative, both at the level of the morpheme and in the output, but not obligatory. The realization of tone will also be described. In particular, I focus on the pitch patterns found on intonation phrase-final syllables, which depend on a complex interaction between lexical tone, intonational boundary tones (whether the word is lexical or grammatical), and the moraic weight of the syllable. Finally, the tone system of Metnyo Ambel will be compared with the prosodic systems of other nearby languages, including the closely related Maya and Matbat.