O'odham Rhythms

Morphology and syllable weight have both been shown to affect stress patterns, but these effects are analyzed in different ways. The theoretical goal of this dissertation is to propose a Optimality Theoretic model to account for how morphology influences stress, and to do this in a way that parallels the influence of weight upon stress. Prince (1990) lays out the WEIGHT-TO-STRESS PRINCIPLE, formalizing the principle by which heavy syllables attract stress in quantity-sensitive systems. I argue for the MORPHEME-TO-STRESS PRINCIPLE, a constraint that forces morphemes to attract stress in morphological stress systems. The WEIGHT-TO- STRESS PRINCIPLE has a counterpart, the STRESS-TO-WEIGHT PRINCIPLE, which forces stressed syllables to be heavy. The counterpart of the MORPHEME-TO-STRESS PRINCIPLE is the STRESS-TO-MORPHEME PRINCIPLE, which forces stressed syllables to belong to morphemes. This accounts for systems where epenthetic vowels resist stress assignment.The model proposed here has the following consequences. First, the MORPHEME- TO-STRESS PRINCIPLE can be invoked to account for the prosodic rooting constraint (as in Hammond 1984; or as in the LXWD=PRWD constraint of McCarthy and Prince 1993). This one constraint handles word minimality as a morphological effect, just as it accounts for the assignment of stress on morphological grounds in nonminimal contexts. Second, the formalization of the MORPHEME-TO-STRESS and the STRESS- TO-MORPHEME PRINCIPLES treats MORPHEME and STRESS as variables. I claim that all logical possible relationships are attested for these three variables: MORPHEME, WEIGHT, and STRESS. Preliminary results (in Chapter Five) suggest that each possible ordering appears to be attested.The foundation of the theoretical work is a description of the secondary stress patterns in Tohono O'odham, a Uto-Aztecan language formerly known as Papago. This description reveals that the primary way to predict the stress pattern of a word is the morphology. Words may surface with varying stress patterns depending on the number of morphemes, the presence of epenthetic vowels, or whether a word has been morphologically truncated. The descriptive work is the result of my fieldwork on Tohono O'odham.Ph.D