Stress parallels in modern OT

A phonological typology for stress consists of a set of stress patterns that displays contrasts along distributional features of stress. In this dissertation, I argue that OT typologies, modeling stress, are characterized by families of parallel properties that fully regulate these contrasts. Empirically, this analysis unveils significant, pervasive relationships across stress patterns that have not been identified previously. The 'property' (Alber and Prince 2016) is the fundamental unit of analysis of the OT typology: It classifies languages both grammatically, in terms of ranking conditions called 'values', and phonologically, because a property value realizes a phonological 'trait' that all forms of the language must comply with. Property families classify languages of independent OT typologies into the same classes. Across typologies, a single phonological contrast has multiple reflexes. The consequence is that languages of the same class share aspects of their grammar, correlated with the same kind of formal, extensional effects. This is the case, despite the fact that languages of the same class do not necessarily share any forms. To highlight the scope of this result, a single property family predicts that the following contrasts are equivalent: whether a language parses every syllable into a foot, whether a language is fully quantity-sensitive, requiring stress on every 'Heavy' syllable, whether a language is 'default-to-opposite' for the positioning main stress.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical referencesby Hope Eliza McManu