| ROA: | 153 |
|---|---|
| Title: | Some effects of the weight-to-stress principle and grouping harmony in the Goidelic languages |
| Authors: | Antony D. Green |
| Comment: | |
| 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 |
| Area/Keywords: | |
| Article: | Version 1 |