Zuni Phonology - Prosody

Prosody

At the word level, the first syllable of lexical words receive stress. Although the acoustic correlates of stress are not fully described in Newman's grammar, at least vowel length is a significant correlate: short vowels are lengthened under syllable-initial stress. Stressed long vowels do not appear to have perceptible variation in duration.

Stress at the phrase level was not fully studied by Newman, and, therefore, its details are not well known. Pronouns and certain particles consisting of a single syllable are unstressed when inside clauses, but are stressed at the beginning of phrases.

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