A Typological Outlier Explained: Stress and Phrase-Level Prosody in Plains Cree

Stress in Plains Cree is commonly assumed to follow a typologically highly marked iambic, right-to-left pattern, with primary stress on the antepenultimate syllable. However, conflicting accounts describing penultimate and ultimate stress also appear in the literature. This paper investigates acoustic stress correlates in Maskwacîs Plains Cree, analyzing pitch, vowel duration, intensity, and vowel deletion in 75 words, each realized three times (776 vowel tokens). The results offer evidence that partially corresponds to all previous accounts of Plains Cree stress, with consistent rising-falling-rising pitch on the last three syllables. The same patterns are replicated in a smaller investigation of words in short sentences (425 vowel tokens). We conclude that prosodic patterns do not appear to be cumulative, lexical, contrastive, or rhythmic, casting doubt on previous analyses in terms of stress. Instead, we suggest that the observed pitch movements, like the regularities in duration and intensity, are associated with prosodic phrase boundaries.