A prominence account of the Northern Mam weight hierarchy

Finished · Syllable Weight

Summary

This paper presents acoustic evidence that Vʔ syllables have vowels that are phonetically intermediate in length between VV and VC syllables in Northern Mam. They also provide examples which allegedly demonstrate a novel stress scale: VV > Vʔ > VC > V. They recapitulate the idea from Ryan (2019, 2020) that scales including VV > VC > V are best captured without Coercion but with a prominence view. To account for the Mam data, they propose an additional prominence constraint, Vʔ → MAIN, and ground it in the fact that Vʔ is durationally longer and thus more prominent than VC in the language.

The data is interesting, and I am not completely sure how I would handle it. A few concerns I had were that the Vʔ → MAIN and VV → MAIN constraints are not in a stringency relation, so their constraint inventory predicts that a scale including Vʔ > VV should exist. This is unlikely. Additionally, they argue that prominence is best defined by the duration of a syllable's vowel. However, this wouldn't make sense of VC > V in hierarchies. Finally, the evidence they provide to show VV > Vʔ actually demonstrates VVC > Vʔ, so it could be that this is simply a superheavy syllable outweighing open VV syllables. Additionally because two modal VV syllables never occur in the same word, there is no evidence to show VVC > VV outright.