Morphological and Prosodic Structures in Tahltan

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This research post-doctoral fellowship, entitled, "Morphological and Prosodic Structures in Tahltan," will investigate the stress in two dialects of Tahltan (Northern Athapaskan), and will lead to the development of testable hypotheses concerning the interaction of morphological and prosodic structure. Rhythmically distributed stress and binarity requirements on words suggest a role for the prosodic foot in defining word structure. The prosodic structure of the word is also implicated in the analysis of morphological stress. In one dialect, the morphological stem is always stressed, which may be approached in at least two ways. On one hypothesis, stress assignment has access to morphological structure, and so stress feet may be assigned directly to the stem; on another hypothesis, morphological information is only indirectly referenced and regular stem stress follows from the alignment of the stem and the prosodic word. A line of inquiry is sketched which will distinguish these two approaches on empirical grounds. This analysis leads to a host of empirical and theoretical questions regarding the realization of stress in words with more than one inherently stressed morpheme, the analysis of compounds and inflected verbs, and the historical relationship between regular stem stress in one dialect and lexical stem stress in another.