for those knowing Macedonian

[Katherine M. Crosswhite]

Dear Seelangs group,

This email is especially for those who know something about Macedonian.

I am working on acoustic correlates of stress in Macedonian.  I recorded a
group of native speakers pronouncing various sentences devised to allow me
to make various measurements and comparisons.  I had some (partially)
unexpected results.  I had three speakers:  a father, his son, and his
daughter (so they all come from the same dialect area, etc.).  They are not
from a dialect area with non-normative stress patterns.

On several instances, I *swear* that I hear penultimate stress rather than
the expected antepenultimate.  Furthermore, the same speaker will pronounce
the same word different ways on different repetitions.  I say this is only
partially unexpected because, in studying  Macedonian with the same
speakers, I thought on several occassions that they had used a penultimate
stress, but when I repeated what I thought I had heard, I was always
corrected to antepenultimate.  One of the words from my study that is
particularly prone to penultimate pronunciation is "kanagyanka".  One
speaker almost always says kanagyAnka, another *always* says kanAgyanka,
and the other varies a little but also uses kanagyAnka quite a bit.  (The
father is not the invariant kanAgyanka one, either.)  Each person said the
word six times in various sentences, randomly mixed up with the other study
sentences.  Has anyone else noticed this sort of thing in Macedonian?  I've
read up on Macedonian stress, both in English and in Macedonian sources,
but I've never seen any reference to this.  Is there a known tendency for
penultimate stress in colloquial speech, or in certain types of words?  I'd
love to know what Macedonianists on the list have to say about it.   If you
want to hear some examples, contact me off list and I'll email you some
aiff or wav format sound files.

Thanks in advance,

Katherine

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