Avoiding Boundaries: Antepenultimate Stress in a Rule-Based Framework

Abstract

This article is part of a larger study investigating antepenultimate stress and final nonparsing (extrametricality). Here we examine the rule-based implementation of final nonparsing in Idsardi 1992. We present an in-depth analysis for Macedonian, a language well known for ante-penultimate stress. We argue that nonparsing does not account for all the data, and we propose enriching the inventory of avoidance constraints to directly derive peripheral ternarity. This analysis allows us to account for several details that are not addressed by previous analyses (Idsardi 1992, Halle and Kenstowicz 1991). We also consider crosslinguistic ramifications and suggest that some cases of ternarity result from generalized boundary avoidance.