Secondary and vowel quality-driven stress in Uralic and Northwest Caucasian languages

Date: April 23, 2021

Time: 09:00

Location: PC Zoom Room

Speakers: Matthew Gordon (UCSB)

This talk will explore two types of stress that have been reported for many languages but that have often proven elusive to verify: rhythmic secondary stress and stress positioned on the basis of vowel quality. Focus will be on results of phonetic studies of two languages: the Northwest Caucasian language Kabardian and the Uralic language Nganasan. Both possess long morphological words that provide an ideal backdrop for rhythmic stress, while Nganasan has also been described as positioning primary stress as a function of vowel quality such that higher sonority vowels preferentially attract stress over lower sonority ones. Interactions between stress and phrasal prosody will be discussed in the context of broader analytic issues that arise in the interpretation of prominence.