Competition between syllabic and metrical constraints in two Bunun dialects

Abstract

This article shows how syllabic and metrical constraints interact differently in two dialects of Bunun, despite their similarity in that both dialects exhibit modifications of vowel clusters in response to the ONSET constraint. In Isbukun Bunun, foot forms are constrained both syllabically and moraically. Stress shifts from the unmarked penultimate syllable to final position under duress to satisfy both ONSET and the requirement that heavy syllables must not stand in a prosodically weak position. In contrast, in Takituduh Bunun, metrical wellformedness is considered more important, so the preferred disyllabic foot forms are maintained at the cost of creating onsetless syllables. The analysis is formalized within Optimality Theory by ranking syllabic and metrical constraints differently in the two dialects. OT is advantageous in analyzing the data for two additional reasons: 1) the correlation between stress assignment in nonsuffixed and suffixed words in Isbukun can be directly captured by an output constraint, and 2) the metrical influence on syllabification in Takituduh can be readily handled by allowing syllabic and metrical constraints to interact in the same hierarchy. An implication of the Isbukun data for the properties of surface glides is that pre-peak glides can be moraic or not, depending on whether they follow a tautosyllabic consonant.