High-Ranking Affix Faithfulness inYakima Sahaptin

Alderete 1999 has proposed that accentual languages exhibit either root-controlled accentual phenomena or affix-controlled accentual phenomena. With root-controlled accent, underlying affix accent only surfaces in words which contain unaccented roots; otherwise, underlying root accent surfaces. With affix-controlled accent, the minority case found within and across languages, affixes impose an accentual pattern on roots. Alderete proposes a way in which both patterns can be made consistent with high ranking root-faithfulness, as predicted by McCarthy and Prince 1995. Revithiadou 1999, taking note of languages in which underlying affix rather than root accent surfaces, proposes a theory of head dominance to cover such cases. When a word contains more than one accented morpheme, the realization of multiple underlying accents is determined by HEADFAITH >> FAITH. Sahaptin has a lexical accent system which differs from the cases discussed by Revithiadou 1999 and Alderete 1999. In Sahaptin, underlying root accent (for ordinary roots) surfaces only in words which contain no accented suffix or prefix. We begin this article by describing the theories of Alderete 1999 and Revithiadou 1999 in more detail (§2). Next we describe the accentual system of the Yakima dialect of Sahaptin, including a formal model of the constraint rankings (§3), which indicate that affix faithfulness ranks high in this language. In §4 we briefly discuss another case of high-ranking affix faithfulness, namely modern Hebrew (Ussishkin 2005). We also consider and reject the possibility of analyzing Yakima Sahaptin as a case of Head-Faithfulness. In §5 we summarize our conclusions.