Contextual Metrical Invisibility

This paper investigates a stress phenomenon which I refer to as “contextual metrical invisibility” in several languages, the primary examples being from Mohawk and Passamaquoddy. In each of these languages, there is a class of vowels which are, in certain contexts but not in others, invisible to syllable-sensitive processes. The proposal I make is that such vowels, which I refer to as “weak vowels,” are invisible to syllable-sensitive processes by virtue of not being dominated by a syllable node in the prosodic structure. For illustration, consider the Passamaquoddy word in (1a). In Passamaquoddy, the penultimate syllable of a word is generally stressed, yet in (1a), it is the antepenultimate vowel which surfaces with stress. If the structure of this word is as shown in (1b), however, it is still true that the penultimate syllable is stressed, due to the fact that the word-medial vowel is not dominated by a syllable node. That is, stress assignment is a syllable-sensitive process to which the weak vowel E is invisible in this structure.