Stress or intonational prominence? Word accent in Kazakh and Uyghur

Abstract

This paper investigates word stress/prominence in two Turkic languages, specifically Kazakh and Uyghur, and challenges the widespread assumption that the Foot is a universal constituent of the Prosodic Hierarchy (see e.g. Selkirk 1995, Vogel 2009). Instead, as was proposed for Turkish and French by Özçelik (2014, to appear), it is argued here that some languages, such as Uyghur, are footless, and thus, that the presence vs. absence of the Foot is parametric, thereby extending Özçelik’s proposal to additional Turkic languages. We present three types of evidence for this proposal: (i) phonetic, (ii) formal phonological and (iii) syntactic (from syntax-prosody interface). Phonetic evidence, for example, demonstrates, based on the results of an experiment with native Uyghur speakers, that final prominence in (at least the predominant variety of) Uyghur is accompanied only by an optional “pitch” rise, and not by greater “intensity” or “duration”. This is in stark contrast with the situation in Kazakh, in which, as with true iambic languages (i.e. languages with head-final feet), final prominence is also accompanied by greater duration, as evidenced by the results of an experiment with native Kazakh speakers. Languages that mark prominence only by a pitch rise (like Uyghur and Turkish) are classified, by several researchers, as pitch-accent languages, and not as stress-accent. The latter use duration and/or intensity, in addition to pitch (see e.g. Beckman 1986, Ladd 1996, Hualde et al. 2002). That is, although, on the surface, most Turkic languages seem to be the same in that they have finally prominent words, the source and nature of this prominence are different: it is an iambic foot for Kazakh, whereas it is footless intonational prominence for Uyghur and Turkish.

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