Heavy syllables in Gitksan

Abstract

Very little attention in the existing literature has been devoted to the prosodic structure of Gitksan. Recent work on stress, however, has opened a productive discussion about syllable weight. This paper uses these insights to further the discussion about possible moraic structures, and isolates a difference in how weight is assigned to consonants in stress vs. in other types of prosodic morphology, such as reduplication and word minimality. The patterns that emerge are similar to the behavior of heavy syllables in other languages, but with some key differences.