Re: Stress question

On Wed, Jul 25, 2001 at 04:29:51PM -0600, dirk elzinga wrote:
> On Wed, 25 Jul 2001, Eric Christopherson wrote:
>
> > How about secondary accents? I've been thinking of this accent change
> > scenario:
> >
> > To start with, the primary accent must fall on the final, penult, or
> > antepenult, but never before. Also, secondary accents can occur, generally
> > every other syllable counting from the primary accent. Thus:
[snip]
>
> Your first secondary stress rule is, well, weird. It's unlikely
> that you'd locate primary stress with reference to the right
> edge, then "double back" to locate secondary stresses.
Really? I'm quite surprised, as that's how I tend to analyze my own accent
patterns in English. Of course, mine doesn't fit perfectly into the system
(sometimes stressed syllables are separated by two or zero instead of one
unstressed), but in general it seems to apply. Examples:

<apply> /@"plai/ = [@"plai] -- no secondary stress since there are only two
syllables
<application> /{plI"keiS@n/ = [%{plI"keiS@n] -- [{] receives secondary stress since
it is two syllables from primary stress
<applicative> /@"plIk@tIv/ = [@"plIk@%tIv] -- [tIv] secondary since it is
two syllables from primary stress, this time after instead of before

I'm kinda tired to think up better examples than those. And granted,
sometimes my secondary accent occurs in a syllable right next to the primary
accent, and sometimes it's farther than two syllables from it, but in
general the pattern I described seems to hold.

> The way
> stress rules are usually stated is that stressed syllables are
> determined by some regular count of syllables or morae (more on
> that in the next post, Matthew!). If there is a distinction
> between primary and secondary stress, the {right/left}most
> stress is taken as primary.
Interesting, very. I'll have to keep that in mind...

> Here's an example. Start on the left edge and stress every other
> syllable (shown by an "x" above the vowel of the syllable; the
> bracket shows the reference edge):
Hmm, I hadn't ever heard of an accent system counting syllables from the
*left* before, although I have heard of ones that always stress the very
first syllable. But I don't see why it shouldn't be possible.

> Your cliticization example seems more plausible. However, it
> doesn't seem to address historical changes since stress
> placement is based on productive morphological processes.
Hmm... in the mini-conlang I used to illustrate my point, there was only one
"time slice" of the language represented, thus the lack of historical
change. I'm not sure what you're getting at, though (example?).

--
Eric Christopherson, a.k.a. Contrarian Conlanger Rakko ^_^

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