Word stress in Tashlhiyt - Post lexical prominence in disguise?

This paper reports on a study of lexical and postlexical prominence asymmetries in Tashlhiyt Tamazight (Berber), a language that is renowned for its typologically rare prosodic structures. Carrier phrases were designed to elicit the presence or absence of a postlexical tone on the target word. Contrary to previous reports on the language, measures of acoustic durations and intensity reveal no consistent prominence asymmetries at the level of the word. However, we found evidence for a prominence lending function of tonal events at the postlexical level. We conclude that Tashlhiyt does not show any acoustic evidence for lexical stress and that postlexical events do not appear to be related to lexically determined metrical structures.