Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

that all heavy syllables be stressed - Weight-to-Stress (after Prince 1990) and an OT
formalization of Iambic Lengthening called Iambic Quantity (the 's' side of a (w s) foot
should be heavy). Rhythm is a constraint mandating that every stressed syllable be
followed by any unstressed syllable 113 . Among the situations this constraint can treat are
the avoidance of stress clash and the avoidance of final stress. Hung's analysis can be
summarized briefly as follows: Rhythm demands that final syllables not be stressed.
Weight-to-Stress demands that heavy syllables be stressed, and Iambic Quantity demands
that metrically strong syllables be heavy. Thus, parsing the penult and final of a word into
an iambic foot would require lengthening of the vowel (assuming other routes to
heaviness to be blocked by Faithfulness constraints) because of Iambic Quantity.
Lengthening the vowel would demand that the vowel be stressed (Weight-to-Stress), but
doing this would violate high-ranked Rhythm. Assuming a certain ranking of constraints
on parsing, the solution is to avoid lengthening by not parsing the last two syllables into a
foot. Rules of final shortening and the general absence of long vowels in final position
can be treated similarly. Again depending on the rankings of Faithfulness constraints, it
will sometimes be optimal to shorten an underlying long vowel rather than to violate
Weight-to-Stress by leaving it unstressed, or Rhythm by stressing it.
113 Recalling Hyman's discussion (Hyman 1977) of the crosslinguistic frequency of fixed penultimate
stress and the insight that metrical prominence may be in some way more perceptible if it has metrical nonprominence
following.
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