Abstract
Stress in Gujarati (Indo-Aryan, India and Pakistan) has been alternately claimed to be strictly positional or sensitive to vowel sonority. The latter analyses figure prominently in arguments for scalar markedness constraints (de Lacy 2002, 2006). This study presents acoustic measures and speaker intuitions to evaluate both the positional and sonority-driven stress hypotheses. The acoustic results support weakly cued positional stress, though speaker intuitions for primary stress placement were inconsistent. This replicates Shih’s (2018) negative findings, and indicates that Gujarati stress should not figure in discussions of sonority-driven stress or associated theoretical proposals.
Highlights
The stress system of Gujarati (Indo-Aryan, India and Pakistan) is the subject of some descriptive disagreement
Recall that Shih found that /A/ and perhaps /o, u/ take more extreme F1 values when they occur in the initial syllable, while vowel duration and intensity are not significantly affected by syllable position
Are pitch contours sensitive to initial syllables and more contrasts found in initial syllables, but this study found greater duration and resistance to coarticulation in initial syllables
Summary
The stress system of Gujarati (Indo-Aryan, India and Pakistan) is the subject of some descriptive disagreement. The most prominent current claim is that stress is driven by an intricate interaction between syllable position and vowel sonority (de Lacy 2002; 2006, on sonority-driven stress generally, see Kenstowicz 1997; Hargus 2001; Crowhurst & Michael 2005), though no two analyses agree entirely (Firth 1957; Cardona 1965; Adenwala 1965; Mistry 1997; Cardona & Suthar 2003; Doctor 2004; Schiering & van der Hulst 2010; Modi 2013). Some work claims that Gujarati stress is word initial (Turner 1921; Master 1925; Pandit 1958; Patel & Mody 1960; Shih 2018). Speaker intuitions on stress placement were collected in a third experiment. The results favor the initial stress analysis, though stress is phonetically weak and speakers lack strong intuitions for stress placement
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