Natural Language and Linguistic Theory. doi: 10.1007/s11049-013-9196-6. With Ryan Bennett
Uspanteko (Guatemala; ~2000 speakers) is an endangered K'ichean-branch Mayan language. It is unique among the K'ichean languages in that, along with obligatory right-edge stress, Uspanteko has innovated a system of contrastive pitch accent. Word-level accent in Uspanteko is of theoretical interest for several reasons. First, it has a mixed accentual system with both stress and lexical pitch accent. Second, lexical pitch has striking effects on prosodic and segmental structure, interacting with stress shift, vowel length, vowel quality, and two deletion processes. Third, pitch accent is closely tied to morphology (especially possessive marking) even though the location of morphologically-derived tone is entirely a matter of surface phonology. Fourth, interactions between tone and vowel length provide evidence for lexical strata within the accentual system of Uspanteko. In this paper we develop a novel analysis of Uspanteko accent, using data drawn from previous research as well as our own recent fieldwork. We propose that the location of pitch accent and stress in Uspanteko can be straightforwardly captured under three assumptions: (i) Uspanteko words contain a single right-aligned iamb; (ii) pitch accent must dock to the head of a foot; and (iii) pitch accent cannot dock to a word-final mora. These assumptions account for default word-final stress, as well as penultimate stress in [CVCV] words bearing pitch accent, which we treat as an iambic-trochaic foot form reversal. Interactions between prosody and segmental structure in Uspanteko are analyzed as the result of further constraints on foot shape, stress assignment, and tone non-finality. A surprising finding of this paper is that there is robust evidence for foot structure in Uspanteko, despite the fact that accent in Uspanteko could easily be described in non-metrical terms. Finally, we model accentual cophonologies in Uspanteko using partially-ordered prosodic constraints.