Word stress patterns in Dharamshala Tibetan

Abstract Word stress is a structural property of increasing prominence. An established line of scholarship regarding word stress exists both in terms of theory and description in the Lhasa Tibetan (LT) language. Unlike LT, no such scholarly works are available that focus on Dharamshala Tibetan (DT), a dialectal variety spoken by Tibetan refugees living in the Dharamshala area in Himachal Pradesh, India. The current work aims to provide a systematic and concise theorisation of DT word stress based on the data collected from field in terms of parameters like culminativity, location of the head, direction, and quantity sensitivity. Optimality Theory is used to offer a theoretical judgment behind the analysis. A majority of DT words contain a trochaic, weight-insensitive, left-to-right stress pattern. The degenerate foot is accepted. Very few instances of words with an iambic stress pattern were found during the fieldwork. Similarly, few words containing heavy syllables are available in the word stress pattern inventory of DT.