Chapter 1 Theoretical issues —… no language has a rule stressing the penultimate syllable unless it begins with a voiced consonant, in which case one stresses the antepenultimate syllable“ (Hyman 1985: 96) —(Karo) stress can be predicted by the onset of the last syllable: if it is a voiced stop consonant, then the stress shifts one syllable to the left“ (Gabas 1999: 39) 1.1 Syllable weight The notion of syllable weight is pervasive in phonology. Everywhere we look there are data that make reference to it. The idea behind syllable weight is that depending on their structure, syllables are treated in a different way; thus if a syllable contains a long vowel or - in some languages - a short vowel followed by a coda consonant, then it is heavier than one including a short vowel, i.e. VV, VC > V. The effects of this distinction are most prominently seen in stress, where in many languages heavy syllables attract stress more than light ones. Importantly, VC is heavy in some languages, e.g. Hopi, but light in others, e.g. Lenakel (see below). In Hopi (Gussenhoven and Jacobs 2005: 145), the first syllable is stressed if it is heavy (C)VV or (C)VC [(1a)], but if it is (C)V light, then the second gets stress [(1b)]1. (1) Hopi: VV/VC=heavy; V=light a. q1q .t1.som.pi ‘headbands’ soÂ9.ja ‘planting stick’ b. q1.t1. som.pi ‘headband’ ko.jo. Mo ‘turkey’ 1 In this chapter, unless stated otherwise, the acute accent marks primary stress, the grave accent means secondary stress, and underlining denotes the reduplicated portion. I will interchangeably use VV or V9 to refer to long bimoraic vowels. 11 In Lenakel (Hayes 1995) on the other hand, (C)VCs are considered light and primary stress appears on the penult (2a). Simplifying a bit, secondary stress is (usually) assigned on the first syllable and on every other syllable after that (2b). This pattern however can be disrupted; while a (C)VC will not get secondary stress unless it happens to be located in a position that would receive rhythmic stress anyway (cf. unstressed mol in (2d)), heavy (C)VV gets stress no matter what its position (cf. kì9 in 2c). (2) Lenakel: VV=heavy; VC/V=light a. eh eM ‘to blow the nose’ r0maw M0n ‘he ate’ b. letÁ upwalÁ ukal uk ‘in the lungs’ c. nìkì9nílar ‘their (pl.) hearts’ d. r0mÁ olkey key ‘he liked it’ Several other phenomena are sensitive to syllable weight. A by-no-means-exhaustive list includes: i) compensatory lengthening, i.e. the lengthening that occurs after a segment’s deletion, e.g. Turkish (Roca and Johnson 1999) tahsil → ta9sil ‘education’; ii) word minimality, that is, the minimum word size some languages impose [commonly (C)VC or (C)VV], e.g. Dalabon (Capell 1962, Garrett 1999) allows words that are CVC bad ‘stone’ or CVV bi9 ‘man’, but no CVs; iii) metrics, that is the organization of syllables into feet in songs or poetry. For instance, the most prominent meter in Greek and Latin epic poetry is the dactylic hexameter, where the verse consists of six metra, each of which is made of one heavy and two short syllables ( ); however two short syllables can be replaced by one heavy in which case we have a spondee ( ). In the example below boundaries of metra are marked by parentheses: (crmn) (que vl)(ts cg)(nsct); (crmn) (vbs) [Vergil, Eclogues VI. 25]; iv) reduplication, i.e. the repetition of part of a word that commonly needs to have the size of a heavy syllable, e.g. Mokilese progressive (Harrison 1976, McCarthy and Prince 1986) poki~pokpoki ‘beat’, kookN~kookookN ‘grind coconut’, but pa~paapa ‘weave’; v) (prosodic) truncation as in nickname formation, e.g. among other patterns, acceptable Japanese nicknames are a single heavy syllable (Mester 1990, Benua 1995) Midori~Mii-an or JuNko~JuN-an (-an is the diminutive suffix); vi) gemination, e.g. the consonant doubling that often occurs after short stressed vowels. Creation of a heavy syllable in this manner can serve stress purposes, since some languages require that all their stressed syllables are heavy (Italian). Gemination of this type occurs in Kukatj (Breen 1992) or in Swedish dialects (Kiparsky to appear) such as viss.na ‘to wilt’, takk.sa 12 ‘rate’, hall.va ‘half’; vii) tone. In particular, contour tones may frequently only be tolerated in heavy, but not in light CV syllables. Hausa (Gordon 1999) is a representative example of this sort, e.g. lâ9lá9 ‘indolence’, mântaÂ9 ‘forget’, râs9á9 ‘branches’. The distinction between heavy and light syllables is recognised as early as Jakobson (1931) and Trubetzkoy (1939) and has since been formalised in three major ways: a) CV theory (McCarthy 1979, Clements and Keyser 1983), b) X slot model (Levin 1985), c) moraic model (Hyman 1985, Hayes 1989). All three theories assign abstract weight units to segments in the syllable. The difference lies in what kinds of units these are and what exact syllable constituents are recognised, which of course has repercussions on the predictions made. For example, the syllable tan would be represented in the first two models in the following way. (3) CV-theory X slot-model a. σ b. σ R C V C R=rime O=onset t a n O N C N=nucleus C=coda X X X t a n In CV theory (3a), segments are distinguished as C-ones and V-ones. A welcome result is that by doing so, syllabic segments (e.g. syllabic sonorants, vowels) are separated from non-syllabic ones. For instance, a sonorant that is linked to a C is non-syllabic, but when linked to a V, it is syllabic. Sometimes however, the C and V label is far too specific. For instance, in Ancient Greek, the form esmi ‘I am’ underwent s-deletion and subsequent compensatory lengthening. In some dialects, the resulting form was emmi with C-lengthening, while in others it was eemi with V-lengthening. CV-theory can account for emmi, because the vacated C-position of s is filled by a consonant too, but it fails to do so in eemi where the position is held by a V. This is not a problem that X-slot theories face (3b), since X slots, by being general enough, circumvent this problem of labelling. An issue that arises though is that X-slot models suggest that counting of X units is a sufficient mechanism to account for e.g. reduplication templates. But this commonly proves wrong. For instance, in Mokilese the reduplicated progressive form for /diar/ ‘find’ is [dii-diar] and not 13 [dia-diar], as an X-slot theory would predict, if filling three timing slots was all that was required. The advent of moraic theory (Hyman 1985 and particularly Hayes 1989) aims at solving these problems as well as addressing an issue which arises in both previous theories and which is central to this thesis. Notice that both of these assign a timing slot to the onset and thus seem to allow for the possibility that this constituent may be active in prosodic processes too. However, theorists of the moraic framework claim that this is never the case, consequently, the model must be modified to directly mirror this fact. Hyman (1985) proposes a model which consists of weight units (WU’s) whose function is virtually identical to moras, which is why I will simplify and use moras for Hyman’s representations too (4a). For our purposes, the most important property of this model is that underlyingly all segments start off with at least one WU (4a.i). Crucially, on the surface onsets lose their WU (indicated by the crossed-out mora in (4a.ii)) due to the universal application of the Onset-Creation Rule (OCR). This rule applies whenever a [+cons] segment is followed by a [-cons] segment and its effect is to delete the WU of the [+cons] segment. Subsequently, the [+cons] feature matrix associates to the WU of the [-cons] segment on its right. In other words, the nucleic WU/mora dominates both the onset and the core of the syllable (4a.ii). (4) a. Hyman (1985) b. Hayes (1989) i. underlying form ii. surface form surface form µ µ µ σ σ µ µ µ t a n µ µ t a n t a n This differs from Hayes (1989) who assumes that the nucleic mora is not shared between the onset and the nucleus, but only associates to the nucleus. The onset instead links directly to the syllable node as depicted in (4b). Note that although I have represented the coda consonant in (4b) as moraic, a singleton coda consonant may be non-moraic on the surface (compare Hopi (C)VµCµ with Lenakel (C)VµC above). If it is moraic, this is the result of the application of the Weight-by-Position rule which assigns moras on codas. Moraic theory has several advantages over the previous models. First, it captures the syllabic status simply through the presence of a mora; second, it allows processes such as reduplication to merely count moras and let other syllable requirements regulate 14 the exact shape of the reduplicant. Finally, problems of the esmi type above no longer arise. Compensatory lengthening (CL) is just about mora preservation (but also see Chapter 5). Either V- or C-lengthening can fulfil this goal and both are in principle available. Thus, in our esmi example from Ancient Greek, dialectal variation between eemi and emmi as a product of CL, is natural. With moraic theory, it has therefore been possible to account for a broad set of facts in a uniform manner.