Análise translinguística – acento e redução vocálica: o caso do Western Cheremis

Abstract

This paper aims to analyse cross-linguistically the vowel reduction and stress in Western Cheremis (Itkonen 1955, apud Hayes 1995) applying the proposal of the Multidimensional Metrical Plane (Magalhães, 2004, 2008). This approach follows the principles of metrical phonology (Lib erman and Prince, 1977; Halle and Vergnaud, 1987; Hayes 1995) and Optimality Theory (McCarthy and Prince, 1993), and was initially tested on Brazilian Portuguese data. It will be shown that in Western Cheremis, which reduces all non-full vowels, it is not necessary to call for any constraint like NonFinality (extrametricality) to capture the stress and vowel reduction facts.