Three correlates of the typological frequency of quantity-insensitive stress systems

Abstract

We examine the typology of quantityinsensitive (QI) stress systems and ask to what extent an existing optimality theoretic model of QI stress can predict the observed typological frequencies of stress patterns. We find three significant correlates of pattern attestation and frequency: the trigram entropy of a pattern, the degree to which it is "confusable"with other patterns predicted by the model, and the number of constraint rankings that specify the pattern.