<OT> New Posting: ROA-848

[roa at ruccs.rutgers.edu]

ROA 848-0706

Moraic Onsets

Nina Topintzi <i.topintzi at ucl.ac.uk>

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=848


Abstract:
This thesis examines the status of onsets and their effects
on stress and prosody. I argue that moraic onsets exist,
a claim that contradicts standard phonological models (Hyman
1985, Hayes 1989, Gordon 1999, Morén 1999) which assume
that onsets are not moraic, given that in the overwhelming
majority of languages onsets are inert for prosodic processes.


Using data from Pirahã, Karo and Arabela stress, I show
that weightful onsets actively participate in weight-sensitive
stress assignment. Moreover, I point out that if onsets
can be moraic, a host of other weight-based phenomena, should
also be able to utilize them. This is exactly right, as
verified by word minimality in Bella Coola, Samothraki Greek
compensatory lengthening (CL), onset geminates in Pattani
Malay, Trukese and Marshallese and a variety of other data,
e.g. Trique CL, Bellonese reduplication. Crucially, this
is not a prediction shared by previous prominence-based
analyses of similar facts (Hayes 1995, Gordon 2005, Smith
2005). Prominence is inherently designed to account only
for stress, not for other weight-based phenomena. If one
were to entertain a prominence account, then most of the
data above would remain unexplained.
	

However, not all onsets can be moraic. The proposed model
is restrictive in admitting only two kinds of moraic onsets:
those which are underlying, i.e. emerging as geminates,
and those which are derived in the output and serve for
stress purposes. While the former can be of any featural
content (since they are lexically specified and thus unpredictabl
e), for the latter ones, I claim that only voiceless onsets
can be moraic, whereas voiced ones are never moraic. This
relates to a well-known generalisation affecting a different
prosodic phenomenon, namely tone. Voiceless onsets raise
the pitch of the following vowel, voiced ones lower it.
In many languages such pitch perturbation is interpreted
as tone. My proposal is that in some other languages, this
pitch perturbation is instead interpreted as stress and
is formally represented by means of moras, which are only
assigned to the stress-attracting voiceless onsets. Pirahã,
Karo and Arabela data empirically confirm this finding.

Comments: 
Keywords: onsets, weight, stress, compensatory lengthening, geminates, voicing, tone
Areas: Phonology
Type: PhD Dissertation

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=848