This paper investigates the properties of stress in Georgian (Kartvelian). There is no agreement in the literature as to the existence or location of stress in Georgian; initial, penultimate or antepenultimate syllables are often quoted as possible stress loci, with potentially more than one of these carrying stress in longer words. It has also been noted that the F0 contour of a word/phrase plays an important role in Georgian, leading to hypotheses that pitch might be the primary cue for stress in Georgian. This paper reports on a pilot study that contributes to disentangling these issues. It concludes Georgian has fixed initial stress, which is primarily duration-based and is easiest to detect in shorter words, while in longer words its durational effect is obscured by polysyllabic shortening. There is no evidence, however, for a similar duration-based stress-like target on the antepenultimate/ penultimate syllable. Instead, it is a pitch target that is part of the prosodic makeup of a phrase. The high importance of this pitch target for the prosodic felicity of an utterance, and the insignificant role that stress plays in the overall phonological make-up of Georgian, raise questions about the typological properties of the loci of wordlevel and phrase-level prominence.
This special issue of Acta Linguistica Academica is the second volume of selected papers from the thirteenth Conference on Syntax, Phonology, and Language Analysis (SinFonIJA 13). An international linguistics conference, SinFonIJA is held annually at hosting institutions in the region of the former Yugoslavia and Austria-Hungary, and features work carried out in all areas of formal linguistics. SinFonIJA 13 was held at the Research Institute for Linguistics in Budapest (now the Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics) in September 2020. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the conference took place online, with talks and poster presentations delivered in real time.In the fall of 2020, Acta Linguistica Academica accepted our proposal for two special collections. The first volume appeared in December 2021 (Volume 68, Issue 4), and focused on contributions in syntax, morpho-syntax, and semantics. The present issue is the second of the two, and includes papers on phonology, phonetics, syntax, and semantics.In Unstressed vowels in English: Distributions and consequences, Péter Szigetvári builds on Trager & Bloch (1941) and Szigetvári ( 2016) and provides further evidence for the claim that diphthongs in (British) English are short vowels followed by consonants (glides). Novel evidence, presented in the paper, comes from the distribution of unstressed vowels in British English. Phenomena that are brought to bear on the analysis include the parallelism between the vocalic components of diphthongs and unstressable short vowels, and the realization of diphthongs in unstressed positions.Eirini Apostolopoulou in her paper Place of articulation shifts in sound change: A gradual road to the unmarked shows how markedness of codas is reduced in the diachronic development of Italiot Greek. The paper focuses on the changes that affect heterosyllabic clusters consisting of a non-coronal and a coronal consonant, and proposes three stages of change: (a) no shift; (b) DORSAL > LABIAL shift, and (c) DORSAL, LABIAL > CORONAL shift. The diachronic process is accounted for in terms of Rice's (1994) model of the PLACE node, de Lacy's (2002) markedness hierarchy, and Alber & Prince's (2015) Property Theory.Sebastian Bredemann's paper The role of phonology in Vata adjectival agreement provides novel evidence in favor of integrational theories of the morphology-phonology interface (e.g., Wolf 2008), as opposed to the separational ones (Halle and Marantz 1993). According to the former, the general phonology of a language can influence Vocabulary Insertion; according to the latter, Vocabulary Insertion does not interact with the phonological component of the grammar. The paper offers new evidence from adjectival agreement in Vata, where the shape of the agreement morpheme is determined by the phonology of the adjectival stem. This pattern can be straightforwardly accounted for under an integrational approachbut not a separational one.Kata Baditzné Pálvölgyi's paper Tonal peaks in the spontaneous speech of vantage level Hungarian learners of Spanish...
This paper investigates the interaction of word stress and phrasal prosody in Georgian by studying the distribution of acoustic cues (duration, intensity, F0) in controlled data. The results show that initial syllables in Georgian words are marked by greater duration than all subsequent syllables, regardless of syllable count and phrasal context. After excluding domain-initial strengthening as an alternative explanation, this finding provides evidence in favor of fixed initial stress. Likewise, initial syllables are marked by greatest intensity, but the consistent gradual drop in intensity throughout the word suggests that this effect may not be stress-related. The F0 results align with the existing accounts: individual lexical words form ACCENTUAL PHRASES, marked by a low pitch accent on the initial syllable and a high final boundary tone on the final syllable. Additionally, new evidence for a phrasal accent, aligned with the penult, is presented. F0 targets are shown to be completely absent in the context of post-focal deaccenting, which shows that F0-marking in Georgian is reserved for phrasal prosody and is not intrinsic to stress-marking. These results help account for the facts related to word stress, phrasal intonation, and their interplay in Georgian, the object of debate in the literature.
This chapter provides a comprehensive overview of the stress systems in Abkhaz-Adyghean/North-West Caucasian, Nakh-Dagestanian/North-East Caucasian, and Kartvelian/South-Caucasian languages, as well as the larger Indo-European languages of the area, Ossetic (Iron and Digoron) and Armenian. First, it addresses the so-called free stress languages, in which stress placement is not restricted to particular syllables/syllable types or morphemes, and the fixed stress languages, in which stress always targets a syllable in a certain position, counting from the left or right edge of a word. Next, quantity-sensitive stress systems are considered, in which stress is found on the heavier syllable within a given domain, such as a whole word or a part of it (a so-called stress window). Further, the chapter discusses languages in which stress assignment is morphologically conditioned. After the chapter introduces this classification of stress systems, it addresses the more complex cases that do not (fully) fit into it, notably the stress systems of Abkhaz-Adyghean and some of the Nakh-Dagestanian languages. Finally, the chapter considers underdescribed stress systems and languages for which conflicting descriptions have been proposed. The chapter closes with an overview of the available instrumental studies. Overall, the aim of the current chapter is to highlight the impressive diversity that the languages of the Caucasus exhibit in the realm of word stress and emphasize the need for further research in the area, both instrumental and theoretical.
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