Stress Parallels in Modern OT
Hope McManus
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/003406
October 2016
In this dissertation, I argue that OT typologies, modeling stress, are characterized by families of parallel properties that fully regulate contrasts along distributional features of stress. Empirically, this analysis unveils significant, pervasive relationships across stress patterns that have not been identified previously. The ‘property’ (Alber and Prince 2016) is the fundamental unit of analysis of the OT typology: It classifies languages both grammatically, in terms of ranking conditions called ‘values’, and phonologically, because a property value realizes a phonological ‘trait’ that all forms of the language must comply with. Property families classify languages of independent OT typologies into the same classes. Within a language class, languages share features of the grammar, correlated with the same kind of formal, extensional effects. Consequently, across typologies, a single phonological contrast has multiple reflexes; this, despite the fact that languages of the same class are not related in any obvious way. To highlight the scope of this result, a single property family predicts that the following contrasts are equivalent: whether a language parses every syllable into a foot, whether a language is fully quantity-sensitive, requiring stress on every ‘Heavy’ syllable, whether a language is ‘default-to-opposite’ for the positioning main stress.