A grammar of Pite Saami, 2014

2 Prosody
This description of the phonology of Pite Saami begins with a discussion of
prosodic structures before the segmental phonology is described. This choice of
ordering is motivated by the important role that prosodic positions play in the
distribution of phonemes (as well as in morphophonology). It is useful to first
understand the prosodic structure of Pite Saami words before looking at their
segmental composition here, and later to better understand morphophonology.
While there are a number of monosyllabic functional words, all Pite Saami
lexical forms and many functional words are minimally bisyllabic. The first two
sections (§2.1 and §2.2) describe the prosodic structures of these two groups of
words. Then, utterance-level prosodic phenomena are dealt with in §2.3.
2.1 Monosyllabic word structure
While the majority of Pite Saami words are polysyllabic, a small set of functional
words are monosyllabic. This set includes, for instance, some interjections, conjunctions
and pronouns. These monosyllabic words consist of at least one vowel 1
and one consonant. This consonant can be in either onset or coda position; it is
also possible for both consonant positions to be filled. Consonant clusters are
licensed in coda position as well. The possible segmental structure templates for
monosyllabic words are listed with examples in Table 2.1 on the following page.
2.2 Multisyllabic word structure
All lexical forms and a large number of functional words in Pite Saami are minimally
bisyllabic. The smallest prosodic segmental structure attested for polysyllabic
words is
VCV
1 All vowel phonemes except /u͡a/ are attested in monosyllabic words.