Re: Justifying a stress pattern

Andreas:

It seems to be a perfectly reasonable stress pattern. In most versions of
stress theory, the final consonant or syllable *can* be ignored (or rendered
"extrametrical" to use the technical term) for the purposes of reckoning
stress. You mentioned Latin -- Latin is a good example of final syllable
extrametricality: its description is something like "Stress the penult if it
is heavy; else stress the antepenult." Notice that the final syllable never
comes into it. In your system, the word-final *consonant* is rendered
extrametrical; it doesn't count to make a syllable heavy. Palestinian Arabic
also has this feature. So you can paraphrase your description as: "Stress
the rightmost heavy syllable, given final consonant extrametricality (where
a heavy syllable is a syllable containing a long vowel or diphthong, or one
which is closed by a coda). If there is no heavy syllable, stress the
initial syllable."

Dirk

On Dec 29, 2007 8:17 AM, Andreas Johansson <andjo@...> wrote:

> One project of mine that has never progressed much beyond the naming
> language
> stage is Keshean (Kesheâras). One particularity it has is a system of
> stress
> placement that seemed to make sense at the time but now strikes me as odd.
> Now,
> certain real-world languages feature stress patterns that alo strike me as
> odd,
> but can be explained, or at least compactly described, by moraic theory or
> the
> like - eg. Latin, where stress falls on the second-to-last mora, ignoring
> the
> final syllable. Perhaps someone can think of a similar compact description
> for
> Kesheah stress. The noncompact description might be stated like this:
>
> i) The stress goes on the last syllable if that contains a long vowel (or
> diphthong) or ends in a consonant cluster.
> ii) Failing that, the next long syllable to the left.
> iii) If all nonfinal syllables are short, stress goes on the first
> syllable.
>
> Some examples (colon marks long vowel, accent stress):
> élshas
> elshá:
> elshaís
> aréts
> áreda
> áredikas
> stra:gá:nas
> reáxtanas
>
> ('sh'=/S/, the rest more or less = IPA)
>
> The oddity, of course, is that a long final syllable doesn't attract the
> stress
> if it ends in a short vowel followed by a single consonant. The
> description
> would be simplified if the final consonant, if any, of each word were
> ignored -
> the stress rule would then be stress on the rightmost long syllable, or on
> the
> leftmost in the absence of long syllables - but that seems very arbitrary.
>
> Suggestions? Comments?
>
>  Andreas
>

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