ABSTRACT
Much of the discussion of the previous chapter focuses on the consequences of culminative accent in Cupeno. The over-arching requirement that words have a single stress-accent in this language creates a competition in words with more than one inherent accent. Furthermore, the resolution of accent in multiply accented words, which I will refer to as Accent Resolution (AR), identifies a set of factors that determine which lexical accent is retained. The novel aspect of the analysis of Cupeno is that a role for word structure is recognized in AR. The finding that root accent takes precedence over affix accent is argued to derive from a principle of root-control, according to which retention of a root accent is favored over retention of accent in an affix. Root-controlled AR is apparently not typical, however, as many have argued for a phonological principle at work in AR. For example, in a very influential paper, Kiparsky & Halle 1977 argue that AR in many Indo-European languages is governed by directionality: a word level prominence is assigned to the lexical accent that is closest to the beginning of the word (la). Likewise, Poser's 1984 rule of Accent Resolution in Tokyo Japanese is characterized in terms of directionality, favoring retention of a leftmost lexical accent.
