On Stress in Apachean Languages

P. J. Greenfeld (see LLBA 14/2, 8002347) describes White Mountain Apache with impressive phonetic sophistication. He finds primary stress predictable for this dialect & closely related to Navajo in terms of word structure & syntax, with such stress falling generally on the root syllable of a word. "Mixing levels," phonological, morphological, & syntactic, by tagmemic & transformational grammarians, runs counter to identification of phonemes by purely phonological criteria, & may prohibit interesting empirical research. The Latin stress rule, eg, by which primary stress falls on one of the last three syllables of a word, depending on the quantity of the penult, fails to cover such interesting cases as illic, audit, or Vergili. Presented are data on San Carlos Apache stress phonemes, showing that primary stress cannot always be predicted from word structure. Examples are given of root morphemes under primary, secondary, & even weak stress. Sometimes primary stress comes on a prefix & secondary stress on a root. One even finds primary stress on an enclitic, not on the root preceding it. Modified AA