Many languages exhibit minimum word effects, whereby a content word must consist of at least a heavy syllable, or in languages in which the stress system does not draw a distinction between heavy and light syllable, at least two syllables. The standard account of this is that the minimal word must be at least a well-formed metrical foot. Indonesian presents an interesting challenge to this generalization, in that the requirements for a well-formed metrical foot for stress assignment and those for a well-formed minimal word are not the same.

As shown by Cohn (1989), the basic stress foot in Indonesian is a syllabic trochee (x .). Primary stress falls on the penult, with preceding secondary stress in words that are long enough independent of syllable weight (CAri 'seach for', bIjakSAna 'wise'). Noteworthy is the fact that there are almost no monosyllabic content words in Indonesian and many of those occurring are clearly recent borrowings. The fact that the vast majority of content words in the language are at least two syllables is consistent with stress assignment being insensitive to the weight of the syllable. However, there are two areas where systematic exceptions are seen to this generalization. First, there are disyllabic words including schwa (@) in the first syllable, e.g. enam 'six', kera 'monkey'. These are exceptional, in that normally schwa is invisible to stress assignment and thus a syllable with schwa does not usually "count". Yet words of the shape (C)@CV(C) are quite common. This pattern is analysed by Cohn and McCarthy (1998), by a continuum of syllable weight framed within Optimality Theory. The second class of exceptions is the case of truncation, used with terms of address and personal names, where forms are shortened to a single closed (CVC) syllable. This pattern of truncation is the primary focus of this paper.

Many common terms of address are formed from the base of a kinship term. For personal names, a similar pattern is seen where a vocative or nickname is formed by truncation.

(1)	closed final syllable		open final syllable
	base	truncation	base	truncation
personal names	b. Agus Lilik Erlin	Gus Lik [li?] Lin	d. Budi Edi e. Maria Fernando	Bud Ed Ria Nando

As illustrated in (1), for both terms of address and personal names, the truncated form typically consists of a single syllable. As long as the final syllable of the base is closed, this serves as the form of the truncation (1a & b). If the base is disyllabic and the final syllable is open, then the final vowel will be dropped, providing a closed syllable (1c & d) (with the notable exception of Bu [bu?], from ibu 'mother', where instead a glottal stop is inserted finally). In longer forms, sometimes just the first syllable is dropped (1e). What is striking here is that open syllables are systematically excluded, while no such restriction holds in longer words. This, then, is a word minimality effect, and shows that a closed monosyllable is heavier than an open one. We propose an analysis extending that of Cohn and McCarthy (1998) to account for the observed facts. We argue that Foot-Binarity can be fulfilled at the moraic level under coercion of high ranking faithfulness to truncation. This supports the conclusion that word minimality is defined along a continuum and may show variation in a single language. While often what is defined as minimal for the stress system is pervasive throughout the language, limited, but systematic variation may occur, as is the case in Indonesian.