Stress
Word stress as used here refers to the ‘standing out’ of one particular syllable at the level of the phonological word, as the result of abstract strength relationship between syllables. Usual diagnostics for this kind of abstract stress include:
- a larger inventory of phonemic contrasts on the relevant syllable
- morphophonemic alternations
- phonetic enhancement of the strong syllable
- interaction with postlexical structures.
In Tashlhiyt, there is no evidence for a phonologically marked prominent syllable in the domain of the phonological word: There are no known phonotactic restrictions characterising specific syllable positions, that is, all syllable positions within a word allow the same inventory of phonemic contrasts. There are no known grammatical patterns that take phonologically prominent syllables into account. Sadiqi (1997) notes that stress is not distinctive, and suggests that word stress falls on the last vowel of the stem if there is no subsequent suffix. Similarly, Stumme (1899) notes that word ‘accent’ usually falls on the stem but can be shifted by certain word formation processes. These impressionistic observations, however, are firstly not supported by empirical evidence, and secondly, suffer from unclear definitions of the phenomena in question (‘stress’ and ‘accent’ supposedly being used to refer to acoustic-perceptual prominence, which is notoriously elusive and subject-specific).
Native speaker intuitions, on the other hand, indicate that word stress is not a straightforward concept in Tashlhiyt, as speakers are rather insensitive to phonetic prominence asymmetries within the word. In line with our own experiences, Gordon and Nafi (2012) explicitly state that their native speakers are not able to consistently identify ‘stressed’ syllables, neither through direct questioning nor through rhythmic tasks in which speakers had to tap their finger when they thought they produced a stressed syllable. These observations were corroborated by recent experimental evidence. Roettger et al. (2015) showed that there are no apparent phonetic asymmetries within the word that would indicate that certain syllables are phonetically more enhanced than others (see also Roettger, accepted, for an in depth discussion).
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