Onsets and syllable prominence in Umutina

Abstract

In Umutina the distribution of main word stress is sensitive to the sonority degree of vowels within a two-syllable window at the right side of the word, a property which it shares with a number of other languages. What makes Umutina particularly interesting is the fact that low sonorant onsets in the word fi nal syllable impede the retraction of stress to the prefi nal syllable, even when the prefi nal nucleus is more sonorant than the fi nal one. A constraint analysis is proposed based on the hypothesis that what makes syllables with low sonorant onsets prominent is the sharp sonority rise between a low sonorant onset and the following nucleus.