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ROA:153
Title:Some effects of the weight-to-stress principle and grouping harmony in the Goidelic languages
Authors:Antony D. Green
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Length:38
Abstract:Grouping Harmony (GH) and the Weight-to-Stress Principle (WSP) (Prince

1990) together predict that stressed elements should tend to lengthen

and that unstressed elements should tend to shorten. In addition, it is

predicted that in a trochaic system, a sequence (H L) should tend to

become (L L), since (L L) makes a better trochee than (H L). Besides

these quantitative consequences of the WSP and GH, one might expect to

find accentual consequences; thus, a sequence (L H) should receive

iambic (i.e. right-prominent) stress, and sequences (L L) and (H L)

should receive trochaic (i.e. left-prominent) stress. In this paper

I show evidence for all of these predictions from the closely related

languages Irish, Scots Gaelic, and Manx, examining free variation,

dialectal variation, and historical change in prosodic structure in

a constraint-based framework following Optimality Theory (McCarthy &

Prince 1993, 1995; Prince & Smolensky 1993).
Type:Paper/tech report
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Article:Version 1