Rolle & Vuillermet (2017) – Morphologically assigned accent and an initial three syllable window in Ese’eja

Morphologically assigned accent and an initial three syllable window in Ese’eja
Nicholas RolleMarine Vuillermet
January 2017
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/003280
In this paper, we argue that Ese’eja demonstrates an initial three syllable window within which primary prominence must fall, a typologically rare metrical window (Caballero 2011). We illustrate how this window interacts in complex ways with morphologically-assigned accent, using a corpus of 2,000 elicited verb forms (Vuillermet 2012). We show that the surface position of accent depends on syllable count, root transitivity, and the type of inflectional affix present, classifying affixes into dominant, recessive, and rightmost-preserving sub-types. Further, we argue that tense/mood suffixes are associated with different cophonologies (Inkelas & Zoll 2007) depending on which stem syllable they assign accent to and whether they enforce iterative iambs or trochees. Finally, in Ese’eja when accent is assigned outside the window, the position of primary prominence falls on a position which is rhythmically dependent on the window-external accent, e.g. uniformly two syllables away, termed ‘Rhythmic Repair’. We contrast this novel type to ‘Default Repair’, where primary prominence is realized on a default position when accent appears outside of the metrical window (Kager 2012).

Format: pdf ]
Reference: lingbuzz/003280
(please use that when you cite this article)
Published in: Accepted. Jeff Heinz, Harry van der Hulst, & Rob Goedemans (Eds.) The study of word stress and accent: Theories, methods and data. Cambridge: CUP
keywords: morphologically-conditioned phonology, accent, stress windows, dominance, co-phonologies, ese’eja, morphology, phonology