Re: 'Yemls Morphology

Jeff Jones wrote:

> >> >| An expressed subject is marked by lengthening the last vowel without
> >> >| changing the stress (see Vowel Lengthening), i.e. if the subject was
> >> >| originally monosyllabic, it remains unstressed.
> >
> >It is highly unusual in the world's languages for phonemically long vowels
> >not to receive stress if stress is allowed -- vowel length attracts stress;
> >in Optimality Theory, this is known as the "Stress-to-Weight" Principle.
>
> I've noticed that it's easier to stress the long syllable, but didn't know
> if it was considered a universal. I've decided that stress in 'Yemls will
> be primarily pitch-based, which reduces the problem. Also, most roots will
> have 3 moras, usually with the first one stressed, and many of these will
> have long or quasi-long syllables combining the first 2.
I forget:  did you say that your roots are monosyllabic, or do they
vary in how many syllables they have?  I ask, because a single syllable
having three moras is very rare -- but again, there are counterexamples,
in this case, Finnish and Estonian both require such an analysis.  [An aside:
One of the reasons my phonology professor didn't like one aspect of my analysis
of the Wintu stress system was that I assumed that moraicity was idiosyncratic
(some coda consonants were moraic, others weren't; which isn't that unusual,
cf. Turkish) but that I also assumed that some syllables had three moras. My
analysis actually explained the behavior of the stresses more accurately, but
her point was that it was methodologically unsound, which is I suppose
a valid point.]

> >However, that is a statistical universal:  Hungarian is a counterexample
> >(of which, unfortunately, I have no current record with me to provide).
>
> IIRC, Czech always stresses the first syllable, even if there are long
> vowels later on.
Yeah, that's another complexity:  some languages require at most
one stress in the word, and so naturally if you can't have more than
one stress, the All-Feet-Left constraint (which is the one that forces
having only one stress on the leftmost syllable) will have to outrank
STW.

===================================
Thomas Wier | AIM: trwier

"Aspidi men Saiôn tis agalletai, hên para thamnôi
  entos amômêton kallipon ouk ethelôn;
autos d' exephugon thanatou telos: aspis ekeinê
  erretô; exautês ktêsomai ou kakiô" - Arkhilokhos

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