Rhythmic Repair of Morphological Accent Assigned Outside of a Metrical Window

Abstract

This paper studies the interaction of morphologically-assigned accent and a left-edge three syllable metrical window within which primary prominence is restricted. Kager (2012) illustrates that when morphological (or lexical) accent appears outside of a designated metrical window, primary prominence reverts to a default position within the window. I refer to this as 'default repair'. The main claim of this paper is that the Bolivian language Ese’eja demonstrates a novel type of repair called 'rhythmic repair'. In this type, when phonological accent is assigned outside a metrical window, primary prominence does not fall on a default position but rather appears on a position within the window which is rhythmically dependent on the position of accent. I argue that these Ese’eja data cannot be reduced to a type of default repair involving multiple morphosyntactically-conditioned defaults. Further, I formalize the differences between default and rhythmic repair following Kager’s (2012) view of metrical windows as decomposable into common OT constraints. While default repair involves highly ranked word-to-foot alignment constraints (e.g. Align-Wd-L) ranked above lower Faith-Accent and Parse-Syl, in contrast rhythmic repair involves splitting Faith-Accent into Accent-to-Prominence (Acc-Prom) and Accent-to-PrimaryProminence (Acc-PrimProm) constraints, and ranking Parse-Syl, Acc-Prom, and an Edgemost constraint above Acc-PrimProm and word-to-foot alignment constraints.