Syncope Induced Metrical Opacity as a Weight Effect

In many languages, loss of an underlying vowel results in stress patterns which are atypical for the language as a whole. For example, in Bedouin Hijazi Arabic (Al-Mozainy 1981, Al-Mozainy et al. 1985, McCarthy 1999), syncope of /a/ in an open antepenult creates words with stress on a light (CV) penult rather than the antepenult, the typical pattern for words with a light penult: underlying //inkasarat/ is realized as [/inksa!rat] rather than */i⁄nksarat, cf. [ja!SrÈbin] ‘they (f.) drink’ with a light penult. Cases of stress opacity triggered by syncope are readily handled in derivational frameworks by assuming an initial metrical parse followed by syncope and then migration of the stress stranded by syncope. Thus, following Al-Mozainy (1981) and Al-Mozainy et al. (1985), a word is initially parsed into trochaic feet in Bedouin Hijazi Arabic with final syllable extrametricality: [/in(ka!sa)rat]. Syncope then applies, stranding the stress which subsequently docks on the remaining syllable of the original foot, thereby preserving foot integrity (Halle and Vergnaud’s 1987 Faithfulness Condition): /in(k !sa)rat (syncope)→[/in(ksa!)rat] (stress shift). The analysis of syncope-induced metrical opacity is not straightforward in a constraint-based paradigm like Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993) which assumes a direct mapping between underlying and surface forms. Thus, the same constraint rankings which predict antepenultimate stress in non-syncope words with a light penult are expected to produce antepenultimate stress in syncope words with a light penult as well. Opacity cases such as Bedouin Hijazi Arabic appear to require additional formal devices in Optimality Theory (OT), e.g. outputoutput correspondence constraints (McCarthy and Prince 1995, Steriade 1996, Kager 1996, etc.) or empty nuclei left behind by the syncopated vowel (McCarthy 1999).