28 May 2001

Dr Colleen Fitzgerald (SUNY at Buffalo)

Previous descriptions of Tohono O'odham (formerly Papago), a Uto-Aztecan language spoken in Arizona, shows that words avoid stress clash in phonological words and in clitic groups (Fitzgerald 1997a,b, c). More recent work on another dialect of O'odham, the Western dialect, reveals different findings. This Western dialect of O'odham allows extensive stress clash, while the more Central/Eastern dialect (the subject in the previous studies) does not. This paper examines the extent to which clash is permitted in the Western dialect. Interestingly, the Western dialect of clash permits stresses on morphemes that are unstressed in the Central dialect. The Optimality Theoretic analysis offered here can account for dialect variation merely by reranking constraints.

However, the data from the Western dialect raises the issue about what Optimality Theory can tell us about language, especially if OT continues as a representationally impoverished theory. This issue relates to the type of stress clash permitted in this dialect. There is a growing cross-linguistic literature on how languages treat clashing stresses, either in words or phrases. Clash-based analyses, at least before Optimality Theory, often relied on grid theory to represent the relationship between stressed and unstressed syllables. In Optimality Theory, rhythmic constraints are invoked, but there is often no discussion of rhythmic representations. In this paper, I use data from the Western dialect of Tohono O'odham to inform us about the representation of rhythm within OT. The analysis has interest beyond OT because of the key generalization in this dialect: primary stresses are never allowed to be in a clash relationship, while subsidiary stresses can clash. A version of OT without a theory of how to construct constraints and without a theory of representations fails to tell us about the novelty of this generalization.

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