The Phonology of Stress in North Kashubian Dialects of Hel Peninsula: a Preliminary Survey

Abstract

This article presents a novel interpretation of the stress system of Kashubian dialects of the Hel Peninsula. Until now, word stress in these dialects has been treated as a property of surface forms, with no attempt to identify its underlying motivation. The principal finding of the study is that every morpheme in the dialect carries, at the underlying level, one of three stress markers (unstressed, self-stressed, or left-stressed) and that the phonetic stress of a given form is determined by a set of rules referring to the markers of the individual morphemes. The proposed model accounts for, and enables the prediction of, stress placement in all word forms and its mobility within paradigms and also provides a straightforward explanation for recent diachronic stress shifts.