Phonetic prominence and lexical stress in Munster Irish, 1928 and 2020–21

Abstract Weight-sensitive, non-initial lexical stress in the Munster macrovariety of Irish (Gaelic) has attracted a considerable amount of attention in dialectological, phonological, and phonetic literature since at least the 18 th century. However, the majority of work has been based on phonetically and terminologically imprecise descriptions found in Irish dialectology. Recent acoustic and statistical studies continue to rely on stipulated stress location as a starting point from which to consider phonetic correlates in small samples of data. What has been missing is a larger-scale, multi-region exploration of the distribution of common exponents of lexical stress without relying (implicitly or explicitly) on the presumed accuracy of previous descriptions. A study of di- and trisyllabic words in two corpora of naturalistic speech from 34 L1 speakers of this variety from 1928 and 2020–21, respectively, was carried out. Maximum intensity, maximum f0, f0 range, and vowel duration were modelled as a function of syllable position while allowing for random slopes by token weight structure. Findings show some support for culminative prominence on lone heavy syllables outside of initial position, while results are less consistent for cases of competition between multiple heavy syllables. Large disparities in the frequency of certain weight structures raise questions about productivity of the processes underlying this stress system. Further, differences between findings for the 1928 and 2020–21 data encourage caution in assuming compatibility between historical descriptions and modern data in future work on this variety.