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6 Word prosody

  • Matthew K. Gord
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Abstract

Many phonological properties operate over the domain of the word. For example, stress is typically bounded by the word, as are other phenomena sensitive to word edges, including tone, prosodic minimality conditions, harmony processes, and segmental alternations. North American Indian languages have provided a fertile ground for studying word level prosody due to their characteristic high degree of morphological synthesis, which gives rise to long words that supply a rich backdrop for word-bounded phonological properties. This chapter examines phonetic and phonological aspects of word prosody in North American Indian languages from both a synchronic and diachronic perspective, with a particular focus on stress and metrical structure, areas of research in which North American languages have greatly informed typological knowledge.

Abstract

Many phonological properties operate over the domain of the word. For example, stress is typically bounded by the word, as are other phenomena sensitive to word edges, including tone, prosodic minimality conditions, harmony processes, and segmental alternations. North American Indian languages have provided a fertile ground for studying word level prosody due to their characteristic high degree of morphological synthesis, which gives rise to long words that supply a rich backdrop for word-bounded phonological properties. This chapter examines phonetic and phonological aspects of word prosody in North American Indian languages from both a synchronic and diachronic perspective, with a particular focus on stress and metrical structure, areas of research in which North American languages have greatly informed typological knowledge.

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