Polysynthesis, stress uniformity, and the opposite-to-anchor stress system in Ese Ejja

This chapter presents a study of stress uniformity in Ese Ejja. In morphologically simplex words, inflectional suffixes assign accent to a position in the stem, which is mapped to primary stress. This accent-to-stress algorithm results in an ‘opposite-to-anchor’ system whereby the location of primary stress is toward the left edge but the triggering suffix is toward the right. In contrast to simplex forms, this mapping does not occur with complex forms, e.g. verbs with both inflectional and derivational morphology. Because Ese Ejja is a polysynthetic language, a large number of derivational morphemes can intervene between the root (at left) and triggering suffixes (at right), which may result in ‘long-distance anchor dependencies’. Ese Ejja conspicuously avoids this situation by suspending accent-to-stress mapping in sufficiently complex forms. Instead, a kind of ‘stress uniformity’ is employed whereby complex forms copy the stress from an equivalent simplex form (i.e. [[ROOT]-INFL]x ? [[[ROOT]-DERIV]-INFL]x, where x = identical stress). This chapter relates these aspects of Ese Ejja stress to the rarity of opposite-to-anchor systems generally (such as ‘count systems’), and the general bias in stress systems for default-to-same-edge properties.