A Typological Outlier Explained: Stress and Phrase-Level Prosody in Plains Cree
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Stress in Plains Cree is commonly assumed to follow a typologically highly marked iambic, right-to-left pattern, with primary stress on the antepenultimate syllable. However, conflicting accounts describing penultimate and ultimate stress also appear in the literature. This paper investigates acoustic stress correlates in Maskwacîs Plains Cree, analyzing pitch, vowel duration, intensity, and vowel deletion in 75 words, each realized three times (776 vowel tokens). The results offer evidence that partially corresponds to all previous accounts of Plains Cree stress, with consistent rising-falling-rising pitch on the last three syllables. The same patterns are replicated in a smaller investigation of words in short sentences (425 vowel tokens). We conclude that prosodic patterns do not appear to be cumulative, lexical, contrastive, or rhythmic, casting doubt on previous analyses in terms of stress. Instead, we suggest that the observed pitch movements, like the regularities in duration and intensity, are associated with prosodic phrase boundaries.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".