A reassessment of word prominence in Mapudungun: Phonological vs. morphological activation

This chapter examines the word-prominence system of Mapudungun (formerly ‘Araucanian’), rejecting the widespread claim that the language is a perfect grid stress system. A reassessment of the primary literature, alongside analyses o an original dataset, show a system that does not fall squarely within traditional prosodic typology and lacks some canonical features of stress (culminativity, rhythmicity). Despite this, Mapudungun displays ob- ligatoriness of word-level prominence, a de nitional feature of stress systems (Hyman 2006, 2009).
A non-iterative, right-aligned, moraic trochee is proposed to bear stress at the word level, while at the stem level, a second stress is identi ed on the nal syllable. Such parsing, however, seems to have limited phonological activation (Clements 2001): especially in complex words, prominences appear to be assigned with reference to morphological structure and have remarkably little e ect upon the broader phonological makeup of the language. Finally, it is argued that lack of prominence-based segmental asymmetries, absence of culminativity, as well as the unambiguous marking of the stem-edge, conspire to create transparency in the morphological structure of complex words.