Stress and Suffixation in Isbukun Bunun

Abstract

Isbukun, a major dialect of Bunun, is one of the Austronesian languages spoken in Taiwan. According to the Taiwan government statistics in 2009, Bunun had a population of 51,447, around half of which were registered as Isbukun. As Mandarin and Southern Min are the predominant languages, the Austronesian languages in Taiwan including Bunun are endangered. This study investigates word stress in Isbukun Bunun from the perspective of Optimality Theory. In particular, the stress patterns of monomorphemic and compound words, derivational and inflectional suffixed words, and words with clitics are explored. In Isbukun Bunun, a single quantity-sensitive trochee formed at the right edge of a word. Consequently, prefixation is generally irrelevant to footing, whereas suffixation closely interacts with stress placement. This paper presents two types of extrametricality along with quantitative adjustment that are found in suffixed words. Morphological extrametricality prevents inflectional suffixes and clitics from being footed and thereby prosodically distinguishes derivation and compounds from inflection and clitics. Positional extrametricality avoids forming a foot at the left edge of a root, which only emerges in derivational words, because inflectional words are required to fulfill morphological extrametricality first. In addition, since feet are constructed at the end of a word and derivational suffixes are allowed to be footed, quantitative changes take place in derivational suffixation: adjacent vowels with the same quality merge into one when two vowels come from different morphemes (i.e. the final segment of the stem and the initial segment of the suffix), and moras are deleted if otherwise the number of syllables in a word would increase. To account for the morphological extrametricality, a pair of output-output faithfulness constraints are used: a higher ranked OO-IDENT(stress)INF with an index referring to inflectional suffixes and clitics, and a lower ranked clone OO-IDENT(stress) without an index. The constraint ranking OO-IDENT(stress)INF >> ALL-FT-R >> OO-IDENT(stress) generates inflectional words with stress on the same syllable as in their stems, while derivational words follow general footing principles. As for the positional extrametricality, an anti-alignment constraint *ALIGN-L(Root, FT) is proposed, which concerns positions of feet only with respect to the root, rather than the stem that may be polymorphemic. The constraint ranking OO-IDENT(stress)INF, DEP-μ >> *ALIGN-L(Root, FT) >> *STRUC-σ confines the emergence of non-initiality in derivational words with roots not smaller than two moras.