Abstract This article tests theories of verb stress in the Northwest Caucasian language Abkhaz using a new database corpus of 3,115 inflected forms of 445 verbs. I describe the creation of the corpus and show how it can be used to gain new insights into principles of Abkhaz stress assignment, which depend on complex interactions between phonology and polysynthetic verbal morphology. I implement a previous theory of Abkhaz stress assignment (Dybo 1977) in a computer program and use the corpus to assess empirically how well it accounts for stress patterns across the lexicon of eventive verbs in Abkhaz. I show how this empirical evaluation identifies both strengths and weaknesses of the theory, and use these to propose a revised theory of Abkhaz stress assignment. The revised theory ties with or outperforms the original in all verb categories, accounting for the stress alternations in 40 additional verbs, which comprise almost 10% of the corpus. This shows that corpora, combined with computational implementations of phonological theories, can be used to further our understanding of highly complex phonological data sets.
Samuel Andersson (Thu,) studied this question.