Reanalysis of Shipibo Stress Motivated By New Data on Prefixation

Abstract

Shipibo, spoken in Amazonian Peru, has a complex system of word-level stress assignment that early studies described as being partially predictable and partially lexically determined. More recent studies have attempted to analyze Shipibo primary stress as overall predictable by postulating underlying consonants. However, hitherto no phonological studies have considered the effect of prefixation on stress assignment, which provides definitive evidence that primary stress in Shipibo is in fact only partially predictable. Body-part prefixes also uncover stress patterns that reveal important clues about the structure of proto-Panoan syllables. This paper proposes a synchronic analysis of Shipibo stress that takes into account these new data and puts forward a historical explanation for the intricate stress systems found in many modern Panoan languages.