Accent Strength in Lithuanian: Evidence from the Saussurean Accent Shift

Abstract

This paper investigates the distribution of surface accents in Lithuanian nominals based on data from Standard Lithuanian. Inflected nouns and adjectives in this language are subject to the following major accent rules: (a) the Basic Accentuation Principle (Halle & Vergnaud 1987a; b); (b) the Saussurean Accent Shift (Blevins 1993, Ambrazas 2006). I argue that one can account for both in a system where underlying lexical accents can vary in strength. This approach provides advantages compared to the analysis presented in Blevins (1993). For instance, in order to determine the placement of the accent within a weak stem, one does not have to resort to extraprosodicity or floating tones, thanks to a weak accent being present in the UR. The Saussurean Accent Shift, for which Blevins’s paper accounts only partially (see Section 5), is analyzed as an edge effect whereby a clash of two underlying accents at the right edge of a prosodic word results in the surface accent being right-aligned.

Theoretical approaches to grammatical tone

“…The empirical richness of GT has engendered a rich literature of explicit theoretical proposals. Grammatical tones have been analysed as qualitatively distinct contrastive units (Kimenyi 1978 on Kinyarwanda [kin]), and more recently as quantitatively distinct using gradient strength (a scale from 0.0 to 1.0; Smolensky & Goldrick 2016; Zimmermann 2018; Kushnir 2022). Various approaches have also used special configurations of floating tones to produce unique grammatical tone effects, for example, ‘circumfixal’ floating tones in Trommer (2011).…”