Plains Cree Word Prosody Revisited

Abstract Accounts of prosody in understudied languages are often impressionistic, potentially leading to conflicting accounts due to different researchers being drawn to different acoustic cues. The debate surrounding the location of primary stress in Plains Cree is such a case. One widely adopted claim states that stress is realized on the antepenult, whereas others argue for a penultimate accent. The present study investigates the phonetic properties of stress (duration, F0, intensity, vowel quality) in multisyllabic words and in phrases to understand the patterns that have led to the current debate. We find that there are cues supporting both previous claims: a high F0 on the antepenultimate syllable compatible with “antepenultimate stress” and a falling F0 on the penultimate syllable compatible with “penultimate accent.” Based on the acoustic evidence, we suggest that Plains Cree is a pitch-accent system, with a predictable penultimate HL word-level pitch-accent. Tonal patterns in other syllables are the result of prosodic boundaries, phonetic interpolation, or tonal spreading.