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Sensitivity to complex onsets in Iron Ossetian
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2026
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This paper describes and analyzes the onset-sensitive stress system of Iron Ossetian (Eastern Iranian; Russia, Georgia; henceforth Iron). Iron instantiates a rare stress pattern that has been controversially identified in previous literature. Attested onset sensitive systems are commonly sensitive to onset presence or quality (Hyde 2007; Gordon 2005; Topintzi 2010). However, stress in Iron is categorically sensitive to onset complexity, but not onset presence. Syllables with simplex onsets or null onsets are light. Those with complex onsets are heavy. Such a pattern has only been claimed for a few languages, often controversially (Topintzi 2010, 2022). This pattern provides a challenge for current OT frameworks designed to analyze onset sensitive stress. This paper first establishes evidence for the weight of the aforementioned syllable types and then provides an OT analysis for this onset sensitive pattern.
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Published by the Linguistic Society of America with permission of the authors under a CC BY 3.0 license.- Copyright
- Copyright © 2024 Amber Lubera
Footnotes
*
This work was funded by the NSF Grant BCS-1844828: Documentation and comparative grammatical analysis of aspects of five Iranian languages, awarded to Simin Karimi (PI) and completed in collaboration with the Iranian Linguistics Team at the University of Arizona. I would like to thank the entire Iranian Languages & Lingusitics group at the University of Arizona, who provided valuable early feedback and support for this project. I would also like to thank my co-presenter for early versions of this work, Ryan Walter Smith, who was involved in the formative development of this paper. Finally, I want to extend my heartfelt thanks to Meg Harvey, Mike Hammond, Simin Karimi, and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable insight and comments during the review process.
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