Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Henry Churchyard" <churchh AT crossmyt.com>]

> Subject: tiberian stress shifting
> From: decaen AT chass.utoronto.ca (Vincent DeCaen)
> Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2001 09:26:39 -0400 (EDT)

> dear tiberiophiles, it was pointed out that all stress shifting in
> tiberian readings conspires to place stress on the right-most
> surface-open syllable. (notice that the generalization runs from
> pausal to contextual forms: there is no single generalization, that
> i know of, that runs the other way.)  is that in fact true? i can't
> think of any counterexamples.  if so, does that not cry out for a
> constraint-based approach to tiberian phonology?


Vincent, this was discussed at great length in my dissertation.

The answer is that no, Tiberian Biblical Hebrew stress shifts do not
always shift stress onto word-final open syllables.  The most
prominent exception to that idea is the wayyiqtol stress shift (which
shifts stress from word-final to penultimate, when going from the
main-stress position of pausal forms to that of contextual forms), and
there's also _n@siga_ or _nasog 'ah.or_ of course (though the words in
which the _n@siga_ shift does not take place are not necessarily
"pausal").

What is true about Tiberian stress shifts is:

1) Stress is almost never shifted onto a CVC closed syllable with
short vowel.

2) If you examine the _diachronic_ shifts that affected Hebrew
main-stress positioning over time, you find that basically all of the
historical developments had the result of shifting stress towards the
end of the word (see section 4.5 of my dissertation, including the
discussion on p. 739, downloadable from
http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/ , direct link to compressed PDF
file http://www.pemberley.com/janeinfo/bigpersonal/c1-4xcpt.zip ).  Of
course, this result that diachronic changes consistently shifted
stress towards towards the ends of words is quite different from the
question of in which direction Tiberian Hebrew synchronic processes
shifted stress (these two questions are logically independent).

Anyway, when I tried to deal with the Tiberian Hebrew stress-shift
using Optimality Theory, I actually found a number of problems (at
least in mainstream Optimality Theory which doesn't allow sequential
derivations).  You can read about his in Appendix B to Chapter 2 of my
dissertation (downloadable from http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/ ,
direct link to compressed PDF file is
http://www.pemberley.com/janeinfo/bigpersonal/c2-sup-b.zip ).

--
Henry Churchyard   churchh AT crossmyt.com   http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/