Recursive Prosodic Structure in Nez Perce Double Reduplication
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3765/amp.v9i0.5194Keywords:
Nez Perce, Reduplication, Prosodic Structure, Recursive ProsodyAbstract
Full and double reduplication are found in Nez Perce (nimipuutímt), a Sahaptian language spoken in Idaho, Washington, and Oregon. Full reduplication is characteristic of many nouns and adjectives, while double reduplication occurs when fully-reduplicated forms are subject to an additional reduplicative process, a Ci- prefix indicating plural. This paper describes the quantity-sensitive primary stress pattern of fully- and doubly-reduplicated adjectives, demonstrating a systematic departure from the usual pattern of quantity-insensitive penultimate stress in Nez Perce. It then use patterns of vowel length and plural exponence to show that fully-reduplicated adjectives exhibit a bimoraic stem minimum (though fully-reduplicated nouns do not), and argues that these facts can be understood as a manifestation of a complex recursive prosodic word structure where each stem is its own prosodic word and the Ci- prefix is adjoined as an affixal clitic.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Published by the LSA with permission of the author(s) under a CC BY 3.0 license.