Word Stress, Pitch Accent, and Word Order Typology with Special Reference to Altaic

Abstract

It has been claimed that in some languages the location of word stress correlates with the word order of a syntactic head and its complement; for example, a verb and its object (Donegan and Stamp 1983, Plank 1988), that is, languages with left-hand stress have head-final order while languages with right-hand stress have head-initial order. Based on an analysis of the data in Haspelmath and Dryer (2005), Tokizaki shows that this correlation generally holds in the world’s languages. However, potential counterexamples to this generalization are Altaic languages, a large number of which have been reported to have right-hand stress and head-final order; see Goedemans, Heinz and van der Hulst (2014) and data in Haspelmath and Dryer (2005). It is argued in this chapter that Altaic languages in fact have word-initial stress as well as right-hand pitch accent. Thus, the general correlation between stress and word order also holds for Altaic languages.