Re: Stress question

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:
>
> /"ataku/ would be realized as ["ata%ku] (% marks secondary accent)
> /a"taku/ would be realized as [a"taku]
> /jama"nartaku/ would be realized as [%jama"narta%ku]
> */"afurasi/ would be illegal since the primary accent falls before the
> penult
> etc.
>
> But clitics and suffixes could break the system. E.g.:
> /"ataku/ + /na/ = */"atakuna/ -- illegal
> One way to deal with that would be to move the primary stress to the
> antepenult, i.e. /a"takuna/. But an idea I tend to prefer is to make the
> would-be primary accent secondary, and then place a "new" primary accent
> elsewhere. Thus:
>
> */"atakuna/ -> */%atakuna/ -- according to the rule by which the secondary
> accents are separated from the primary-accented syllable by an odd number of
> syllables, there is only one position where the primary accent could occur:
> /%ata"kuna/.
>
> Does this make sense? Does it seem realistic?
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. 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.

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):

        [x     x     x        [x     x     x
        cv cv cv cv cv cv     cv cv cv cv cv

This gets all of the stresses in the right places. Now take the
rightmost stress as primary (shown by another "x"):

                     x]                    x]
        [x     x     x        [x     x     x
        cv cv cv cv cv cv     cv cv cv cv cv

This yields a nice interplay between final and penultimate
stress. Getting antepenultimate stress necessitates "ignoring"
the final syllable in certain cases:

               x]
        [x     x
        cv cv cv cv<cv>

Since the final syllable is "ignored", only four syllables are
eligible for stress placement. Of these, the first and third
actually receive stress. The third syllable is the rightmost
stress, so it is interpreted as primary.

Your cliticization example seems more plausible. However, it
doesn't seem to address historical changes since stress
placement is based on productive morphological processes.

I'll have to think about how to describe the kind of system I
had in mind -- Numic languages (Uto-Aztecan) seem to have
undergone some interesting stress shifts, but the details aren't
completely worked out.

Dirk

--
Dirk Elzinga                          dirk.elzinga@m.cc.utah.edu

"The strong craving for a simple formula
has been the undoing of linguists."               - Edward Sapir

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