Prominence in Circassian

Abstract

AbstractCircassian languages belong to the family of Northwest Caucasian languages, which are characterized by highly agglutinative verbal morphology and extensive use of clause-chaining constructions. Despite the morphological complexity and resulting long words found in Circassian, no evidence of rhythmic stress has been discovered thus far. Rather, morphological words typically map in one-to-one fashion to prosodic words, which are associated with a single demarcative stress at or near their right edge subject to certain exceptions attributed to stress-resistant morphemes. An exception to the isomorphism between grammatical and prosodic words is provided by a process involving fusion of multiple short morphological words into a single prosodic word. Stress and intonation support the existence of phrase-level prosodic units characterized by stress-linked pitch accents and boundary pitch movements.