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A Corpus-based Approach to Tahltan Stress

2005; John Benjamins Publishing Company; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1075/cilt.269.21ald

0304-0763

John Alderete, Tanya Marie Bob,

Natural Language Processing Techniques

According to the first paper on the subject, Cook 1972, stress assignment in Tahltan (Northern Athabaskan) is governed by both morphological and phonological principles. Cook’s report describes the language of a Tahltan elder from Lower Post (northern British Columbia) and claims that stress is assigned to the syllable containing the stem and on alternating syllables counting from that stem syllable. Stress is essentially predictable, therefore, and involves reference to both the morphological stem and a binary pairing of syllables. Nater 1989 is a multi-speaker study of Tahltan spoken in the community of Iskut, British Columbia. The description and analysis of Tahltan stress in Nater differs from that of Cook 1972 in some respects. First, Cook’s stress rule states that stress is predictable from morphological and phonological information. Nater, on the other hand, argues that stress is not predictable and is in fact a distinctive feature of the language. Second, Cook’s alternating stress rule entails that stress is iterative and rhythmic in Tahltan, falling on every other syllable. Nater’s transcriptions, however, imply that stress is noniterative, since only compounds have more than one stress per word. Even three-syllable words, like menedu ‘domestic sheep’, and four-syllable words, e.g., eskene e ‘my raft’, do not receive more than one stress in his system. These differences of opinion, listed below, raise the question of whether the two researchers used different methods to