27: Stress is realised as a slightly louder and lengthened syllable. Stress assignment is partly fixed and partly lexically assigned. Most words have stress on their initial syllable. A small proportion of words (something around 0.05% in the corpus) has stress on their second syllable. Of these, many are old reduplications of the form CaVbCaVbX(X...); that is, the word looks as if its first CV syllable has been reduplicated. Others are obvious recent loan words which retain the stress pattern of the original word. For the rest, there is no obvious formal reason for the non-initial stress. It appears simply to be a property of these words. A very few words have stress on their third syllable. Those phenomena relating to mono-morphemic words will be exemplified first. Stress patterns in morphologically complex words will be described after this.. (Terrill 1999:27)

29: Secondary stress occurs every second syllable in either direction from the syllable with primary stress. (Terrill 1999:29)

ˈtata spider

ˈurio crab

ˈsiriae fishing

ˈbeata leatherback turtle

ˈmikat centipede

ˈmanoˌgiriˌgiri seagull sp

ˈloviˌtan eel sp.

ˌmitaˈkeu dog

foˈsal fish

vaˈvar talk

buˈtaeo eagle

ˌmalaˈgula bird

ˈnu hair

ˈo nu his hair