Pitch accent drives stress placement in Passamaquoddy Maliseet
Passamaquoddy Maliseet is known among linguists for having a stress system that is insensitive to reduced vowels the system treats these vowels as if they do not exist (LeSourd, 1988, 1993) The vowel that most commonly exhibits this invisible behaviour is schwa, although all other vowels are capable of being skipped over by the stress system, with varying degrees of regularity (LeSourd, 1993) Previous analyses of these invisible vowels have noted that their behaviour cannot be explained by positing that they are epenthetic (Hagstrom, 1995) and instead have proposed that they are structurally "deficient" either in their lexical representation (LeSourd, 1988, 1993) or in the associated prosodic structure (Hagstrom, 1995) I propose that these vowels are not "deficient" or "invisible" to the stress system, but instead are simply too short to be able to host the pitch accent associated with stress or the transitions between these pitch accents. In order to better establish the above claims, some basic facts about Passamaquoddy Maliseet will be reviewed, such as the default stress pattern and the behaviour of reduced vowels. Passamaquoddy Maliseet is an Eastern Algonquian language spoken in Maine, United States (Passamaquoddy) and New Brunswick, Canada (Maliseet) Although around 5,500 people identify themselves as Passamaquoddy or Maliseet (Lewey, personal communication) only about 500 are native speakers (Lewis et al. 2015) As a result, this language is classified as "shifting [into disuse]" by Ethnologue (Lewis et al. 2015) The default stress pattern of Passamaquoddy Maliseet is defined in (1) with examples provided in (2) No distinction is made between primary and secondary stress when transcribing stress in this language all are written with an acute accent