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Cyclicity and stress in Moses-Columbia Salish (Nxa'amxcin)

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Abstract

The very complex system of stress-assignment in Moses-Columbia Salish (Nxa'amxcin), an Interior Salish language that has not yet been discussed in the generative literature, is accounted for in a simple and principled manner within the Halle and Vergnaud (1987a, b) metrical framework by assuming that two rules of stress assignment interact with morphological properties ofcyclicity, accent, andextrametricality. The basic properties of the system are typologically similar to those found in Indo-European languages such as Sanskrit and Russian. Moses-Columbian distinguishes primarily two classes of suffixes: dominant suffixes which trigger cyclic stress assignment and recessive suffixes which are assigned stress by a noncyclic application of a stress rule. Which class a suffix belongs to cannot be predicted from its morphological category nor from its position in a word. Moses-Columbian thus provides support for the hypothesis that cyclicity is a diacritic property which must be specified for each affix.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Linguistics, University of Victoria, P.O. Box 3045, V8W 3P4, Victoria, BC, Canada

    Ewa Czaykowska-Higgins

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  1. Ewa Czaykowska-Higgins
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Additional information

I am grateful to N. Bessell, B. Bagemihl, T. Borowsky, J. Cole, M. Halle, M. Hammond, J. Melvold, E. Ritter, and P. Shaw for comments, to four anonymous reviewers and especially Ellen Broselow for very useful questions and suggestions, and to M. D. Kinkade for generously allowing me to use his files on Moses-Columbia Salish and for many hours of discussion. I am very grateful to Agatha Bart, Elizabeth Davis, and Mary Marchand for helping me to learn about their language, and to the Colville Confederated Tribes for allowing me to work at the Colville Reservation. The research for this article has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (Postdoctoral Fellowship #457-89-0027, Research Grant #410-90-1561) and by the Jacobs Research Funds. The usual disclaimers apply.

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Czaykowska-Higgins, E. Cyclicity and stress in Moses-Columbia Salish (Nxa'amxcin). Nat Lang Linguist Theory 11, 197–278 (1993). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00992914

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00992914

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