<OT> New Posting: ROA-630

[roa at ruccs.rutgers.edu]

ROA 630-1103

Morphological effects on default stress in novel Russian words

Katherine Crosswhite <crosswhi at ling.rochester.edu>
Tim Besaley <tbeasley at ling.rochester.edu>
John Alderete <alderete at sc.edu>
Vita Markman <tenselogician at yahoo.com>

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=630


Abstract:
This article presents the results of a nonce-probe experiment 
conducted with 13 native speakers of Russian and examines the 
implications of these results for the linguistic analysis of 
Russian stress. Experimental items were novel words that ended 
in a sequence of segments either homophonous with a Russian 
case ending or not. Carrier sentences were manipulated to
either
morphosyntactically support a case-marked form or not. Results 
show a strong morphological effect: speakers stressed the last 
syllable of the stem, i.e., the ultima in words without 
inflections, and the antepenult or penult in words with 
inflections (depending on length of the inflection). This 
finding is relevant for linguistic analysis of Russian because 
it uncovers a default location for stress that is not abundantly
apparent in the synchronic phonology. A new formal analysis is 
presented in Optimality Theory that makes crucial use of an 
interface constraint that governs the alignment of prosodic 
structure (stress) and morphology (the right edge of the stem), 
and the OT concepts of faithfulness and anti-faithfulness.

Comments: WCCFL 22 proceedings, ed. G. Garding and M. Tsujimura, pp. 151-164, Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
Keywords: lexical stress, morphological stress, prosody, Russian, Slavic, alignment, prosodic faithfulness, anti-faithfulness, experimental study, nonce probe
Areas: Phonology,Morphology,Psycholinguistics
Type: Conference Proceedings Chapter

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=630