Re: quantity triggered vs. quantity sensitive stress

>The situation is quite different in Lumanesian. It appears that
>stress is what triggers a heavy syllable and not the other way
>around. The reason for this is that, unlike quantity sensitive
>stress languages, stress in Lumanesian lexemes is consistently
>penultimate (with the exception of monosyllabic lexemes).
>Furthermore, this stressed syllable is consistently a heavy CVC
>syllable (whereas light syllables are CV only).
[snip]

>The result is that all words must have one of the three possible
>stressed syllable forms. Furthermore, stressed heavy syllables vary
>in the coda depending on the tone used. All in all, words without a
>heavy syllable cannot exist. Does this appear natural?
Well, I don't know.  But it's certainly quite natural for stress to
affect the phonetic shape of syllables.  In some African languages
(I'm thinking specifically of Setswana) the vowels in penultimate
stressed syllables are consistently lengthened.  In Malagasy, stress
patterns determine which vowels will devoice.

I seem to remember (but don't quote me) that Kichaga displays some
unusual interactions between stress, tone, and vowel length, but I'll
be damned if I can remember any of the details.  There was a dissertation
written about this a few years back.  Perhaps Dirk Elzinga, our resident
generative phonologist, can provide a reference?  :-)

Matt.

------------------------------------
Matt Pearson
mpearson@ucla.edu
UCLA Linguistics Department
405 Hilgard Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1543
------------------------------------