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Positional vs. sonority-driven stress in Gujarati: New experimental evidence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2026

Dustin Bowers
Dustin Bowers*
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, P.O. Box 210025, The University of Arizona, Tucson AZ 85721 USA
*
bowersd@email.arizona.edu
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Abstract

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Stress in Gujarati (Indo-Aryan, India and Pakistan) has been alternately claimed to be strictly positional or sensitive to vowel sonority. The latter analyses figure prominently in arguments for scalar markedness constraints (de Lacy 2002, 2006). This study presents acoustic measures and speaker intuitions to evaluate both the positional and sonority-driven stress hypotheses. The acoustic results support weakly cued positional stress, though speaker intuitions for primary stress placement were inconsistent. This replicates Shih's (2018) negative findings, and indicates that Gujarati stress should not figure in discussions of sonority-driven stress or associated theoretical proposals.

Keywords

Gujaratistressprosodyvowel sonorityscalar markedness

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Phonological Data and Analysis , Volume 1 , Issue 1 , 2019 , pp. 1 - 28
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
Published by the Linguistic Society of America with permission of the author under a CC BY 3.0. license.
Copyright
Copyright © 2019 Dustin Bowers.

Footnotes

*

I would like to thank Kie Zuraw, Paul de Lacy, Jason Shaw, Tim Mills, Patricia Keating, Sun-Ah Jun, Megha Sundara, Amanda Rysling, Shu-hao Shih, and Bruce Hayes for discussion and comments on this work. For their help in obtaining the data for this study, I would like to thank Kavita Krishnakant, Ashvina Panchal, Krishnakant Panchal, and the Shree Swaminarayan Gurukul. Finally, for their help in processing the data, I would like to acknowledge Dan Keating, Irene Yoo, Grace Gaspardo, and Annie Chapman. This work was supported by the UCLA Graduate Research Mentorship Program and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. All errors are my own.

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