Word Stress and Phrase Accent in Georgian

Abstract

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.

Disentangling word stress and phrasal prosody: A view from Georgian

“…Based on these results, they suggest that word stress in Georgian is fixed on the initial syllable, while the antepenult and penult are loci of phrasal intonational F0 targets. Borise & Zientarski (2018) arrive at the same conclusion -initial word stress and phrasal F0 targets anchored to the right edge of prosodic domains -based on a larger dataset (one speaker, 179 words of 1-6 syllables embedded in carrier phrases).…”

“…The experiment builds on previous instrumental work, especially Vicenik and Jun (2014) and Borise & Zientarski (2018). The stimuli consisted of Georgian words (n=172) two to five syllables long, of CV syllable structure, where onsets contain a single voiced consonant (a nasal, liquid, or a voiced stop or fricative), and the vowel is any of the five vowels of Georgian /i, u, ɛ, ɔ, a/.…”

“…12 One of the speakers, F2, was recorded by Xavier Zientarski, with the results reported in Borise & Zientarski (2018).…”

Focus projection need not be based on pitch accents: evidence from Georgian

“…This is illustrated in (17) for 20 This technique is borrowed from Skopeteas & Féry's (2016) analysis. Note that they also included antepenults as potential tonal targets, but here they are discounted, given that no durational or F0 effects were found on antepenults in previous studies (Alkhazishvili 1959;Borise & Zientarski 2018;Borise 2019). an SV string.…”

“…The properties of word stress have long been debated, but there is consensus that (i) in di-and trisyllabic words stress is initial, and (ii) in longer words, in addition, secondary stress may occur on the antepenult or penult (Selmer 1935;Robins & Waterson 1952;Alkhazishvili 1959;Tevdoradze 1978). Experimental evidence demonstrates that Georgian has fixed initial stress, cued by greater duration as compared to other syllables/vowels (Vicenik & Jun 2014;Borise & Zientarski 2018;Borise 2019).…”