<OT> New Posting: ROA-569

[roa@equinox.rutgers.edu]

ROA 569-1202

Primary word stress in Thompson River Salish

Gail Coelho <gail@utxvms.cc.utexas.edu>

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=569


Abstract:
This paper presents an OT analysis of the primary stress 
system in Thompson River Salish, an Interior Salishan 
language spoken in British Columbia, Canada. It shows 
that the pattern of conflicting directionality in stress 
in this language can be analyzed as a conflict between 
two alignment constraints, each of which targets 
opposite edges of the word. Roots and grammatical 
suffixes in Thompson River Salish are divided into two 
classes: accented and unaccented. In a word with no 
accented morphemes, stress is on the first suffix; that 
is, it is leftward oriented. In a word with accented 
morphemes, stress is on the rightmost accented morpheme. 
This paper argues that leftward stress is the result of 
an Align-L constraint whice requires primary word stress 
to be on the leftmost vowel in the prosodic word; but 
rightward stress is due to the dominance of an 
Anchor-Pos-R constraint that forbids deletion of accent 
on the rightmost accented morpheme.

Interestingly, the Thompson River Salish stress pattern 
appears at first glance to be a suffix dominant system; 
roots and suffixes show the following stressability 
hierarchy (where > means 'gets preference in stress 
over'): accented suffix > accented root > unaccented 
suffix > unaccented root. Although suffixes stand higher 
in this hierarchy than roots, I show in this paper that 
the TRS stress system actually exhibits dominance in 
root-faithfulness: the dominance of Dep-IORoot ensures 
that accent insertion is avoided on an unaccented root, 
making unaccented suffixes more stressable than 
unaccented roots. The fact that accented suffixes are 
more stressable than accented roots is derived from the 
dominance of the Anchor-Pos-R constraint that forbids 
deletion of rightmost accent when accent is present in 
the input.

Keywords: lexical stress, conflicting directionality

Areas: Phonology

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=569