Speaker: Ben Macauley (SOL) Title: A phonetic path to rightward stress shift in Austronesian

Abstract:

There is a split in the Austronesian languages of Taiwan between those with final stress and those with penultimate stress, as well as two documented cases of such languages that show both patterns. In these cases, final stress occurs on words with schwa in the penult. Recent scholarship has proposed that the presence of such an alternation is a conservative feature in Austronesian, rather than a pattern that has developed multiple times in parallel both within and outside of Taiwan, as well as that the alternation is the result of structural constraints in moraic and prosodic phonology. In this seminar, I reject both of these premises, and offer a simpler phonetically-based approach to rightward stress shift in Austronesian that accounts for the distribution of final vs. penultimate stress in Austronesian, and provides a reasonable pathway to the stress shift alternation as a parallel development in multiple Austronesian languages. This analysis is grounded in an Articulatory Phonology model of the gestural timing of pitch accents, based on novel fieldwork on the intonational phonologies of Austronesian languages in Taiwan.

 

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