Durational Variability and Stress-Timing in Hawaiian

The PVI is a phonetic measure, which has been associated with the impressionistic categories of stress-timed and syllable-timed languages. This paper reports on some preliminary PVI values for Hawaiian, a rhythmically unclassified Eastern Polynesian language. The meaning of the Hawaiian PVI values are considered against an invented measure, called the 'slope PVI'. This measure is a linear discriminant classifier, which defines what it means for a PVI value to be 'high' or 'low'.