Re: quantity triggered vs. quantity sensitive stress

At 11:54 am -0700 17/11/98, Matt Pearson wrote:
>>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.
Yes, stress often affects the phonetic shape of syllables.  Kristian might
find the Greek system interesting.  In ancient Greek word accent was
undoubtably one of _pitch_ and not stress (it's exact workings are not
clear); all evidence suggests that stress, if it existed, was a phenomenon
of words groups (phrases, clauses, sentences), not of words. Ancient Greek
had long & short vowels and these restricted the positioning of the pitch
accent, but whether syllabes were open or blocked had no effect whatever -
this is in marked contrast with Classical Latin where the weight of the
_whole_ syllable, i.e. vowel length _and/or whether the syllable was open
or blocked, determined the position of the stress accent.

Now at some time during the Hellenic period - probably gradually, in
different places - the ancient pitch accent gave way to stress accent.  For
the most part the new stress accent remained on the syllable where the
vowel had been subject to a rise in pitch in the old system.  But stress
applies to the whole syllable and it led to a break down of the old long &
short vowel system.  Vowel length is no longer phonemic in modern Greek;
vowel lengthening is concomitant with stress.

Ray.