An acoustic study of Tetsǫ́t’ıné stress: Iambic stress in a quantity-sensitive tone language

Abstract

This paper presents both distributional and acoustic phonetic evidence for iambic stress in Tetsǫ́t'ıné (ISO: CHP), a Dene (Athapaskan) language with contrastive vowel length and four contrastive tones. In our acoustic study, we find that the primary correlate of stress in Tetsǫ́t'ıné is duration, whereas intensity plays a secondary but statistically significant role. There was no statistically significant effect on F0 in our results. We discuss our results in relation to several proposals regarding the typology of stress systems. Based on the Functional Load Hypothesis (Berinstein 1979) and Dispersion Theory (Flemming 1995, 2001), we find that our results are to some extent unexpected. We suggest that our results are most consistent with the Iambic–Trochaic Law (Hayes 1995), which predicts that iambic stress systems prefer to use duration as their primary stress correlate.

Mora Insertion in Tetsǫ́t’ıné: apparent cases of under- and overapplication

“…Its morphology could be characterized as underlyingly agglutinating, but surface-fusional: underlying forms consist of discrete prefixal elements with clearly identifiable meanings, but these prefixes often fuse on the surface due to processes of intervocalic consonant deletion and vowel coalescence. Tetsǫt'ıné has four contrastive tones (High, Low, Rising, Falling), contrastive vowel length, and quantity-sensitive iambic stress (Jaker & Howson 2022).…”