An OT Account of Auca Stress

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to show that Auca is not a syllable-counting but a mora-counting language and that an analysis of the stress system provides some evidence for Stratal Optimality (Kiparsky, 2002 a, b) in which the ranking of constraints at each level is assumed to be distinct. The arguments are based on certain facts: 1) there is no heavy syllable, 2} vowel sequences are treated as two separate nucleus or a vowel with one mora, and 3) the language does not have syllable weight distinction.