Displacing the PStem

Abstract

Much debate in prosodic phonology has centered on the question of recursive prosodic layers versus independent constituents. Recently, Downing and Kadenge (Downing, Laura & Maxwell Kadenge. 2015. Prosodic stems in Zezuru Shona. Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies 33(3). 291–305, Downing, Laura & Maxwell Kadenge. 2020. Re-placing the PStem in the prosodic hierarchy. The Linguistic Review 37(3). 433–461) have advocated for a unique prosodic constituent, the PStem, to match stem-level phonology. They argue that the stem level should not be sensitive to canonically word-level phenomena such as minimality and culminativity. Alternatively, Itô and Mester (Itô, Junko & Armin Mester. 2007. Prosodic adjunction in Japanese compounds. MIT Working Papers in Linguistics. 97–111 et seq.) propose that the PStem/PrWd division can be collapsed into recursive PrWd levels, in which any recursive layer can have any given set of properties. In this paper, I hope to add to this debate by showing that Downing and Kadenge’s idea of specifically stem-level processes is falsifiable in light of new empirical evidence from a number of unrelated languages. In terms of the recursion question, I show that there are two types of language behavior with respect to stem- versus word-level phonology: one in which stem and word are the loci of the distinct processes, and one in which stem and word show the same behavior (“recursive identity”). I conclude by showing that arguments intending to reduce recursive identity to cyclicity encounter their own suite of problems.