Against Root Faithfulness in Cupeño Stress

Abstract

This paper develops a new, optimality-theoretic analysis of word-level stress assignment in Cupeño (Takic, Uto-Aztecan). I argue that primary stress is assigned to the leftmost lexically accented (i.e. stress-preferring) morpheme, else to the word's left edge. I contend that this analysis is simpler and better explains the Cupeño data than previous accounts, which assume that special faithfulness constraints privilege the accentual properties of roots over those of other affixes. The typological implications of this renanalysis of Cupeño stress are then discussed; without empirical support from Cupeño, it is suggested that "root faithfulness" plays no role in determining word stress in lexical accent systems cross-linguistically.