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ROA:190
Title:O'odham Rhythms
Authors:Colleen M. Fitzgerald
Comment:Uses SIL-Doulous-IPA, Cairo; U. of Arizona dissertation in 5 files
Length:249
Abstract:Morphology and syllable weight have both been shown to affect stress

patterns, but these effects are analyzed in different ways. The

theoretical goal of this dissertation is to propose a Optimality

Theoretic model to account for how morphology influences stress, and

to do this in a way that parallels the influence of weight upon

stress. Prince (1990) lays out the WEIGHT-TO-STRESS PRINCIPLE,

formalizing the principle by which heavy syllables attract stress in

quantity-sensitive systems. I argue for the MORPHEME-TO-STRESS

PRINCIPLE, a constraint that forces morphemes to attract stress in

morphological stress systems. The WEIGHT-TO- STRESS PRINCIPLE has a

counterpart, the STRESS-TO-WEIGHT PRINCIPLE, which forces stressed

syllables to be heavy. The counterpart of the MORPHEME-TO-STRESS

PRINCIPLE is the STRESS-TO-MORPHEME PRINCIPLE, which forces stressed

syllables to belong to morphemes. This accounts for systems where

epenthetic vowels resist stress assignment.



The model proposed here has the following consequences. First, the

MORPHEME- TO-STRESS PRINCIPLE can be invoked to account for the

prosodic rooting constraint (as in Hammond 1984; or as in the

LXWD=PRWD constraint of McCarthy and Prince 1993). This one

constraint handles word minimality as a morphological effect, just as

it accounts for the assignment of stress on morphological grounds in

nonminimal contexts. Second, the formalization of the

MORPHEME-TO-STRESS and the STRESS- TO-MORPHEME PRINCIPLES treats

MORPHEME and STRESS as variables. I claim that all logical possible

relationships are attested for these three variables: MORPHEME,

WEIGHT, and STRESS. Preliminary results (in Chapter Five) suggest

that each possible ordering appears to be attested.



The foundation of the theoretical work is a description of the

secondary stress patterns in Tohono O'odham, a Uto-Aztecan language

formerly known as Papago. This description reveals that the primary

way to predict the stress pattern of a word is the morphology. Words

may surface with varying stress patterns depending on the number of

morphemes, the presence of epenthetic vowels, or whether a word has

been morphologically truncated. The descriptive work is the result of

my fieldwork on Tohono O'odham.
Type:Dissertation
Area/Keywords:
Article:Version 1