Culminativity times harmony equals unbounded stress

Well-studied computational representations of stress patterns are desirable in phonological analysis for several reasons. Perhaps the most important one is that they reveal insights which are (i) relevant to any particular theory of phonology and (ii) otherwise difficult to divine. This is because these representations highlight the importance of what is being computed and are less concerned with how it is being computed. This chapter demonstrates one example of this by showing concretely how once culminativity is factored out, simple unbounded stress patterns over syllables are of the same formal character as simple harmony systems over consonants and vowels. This analysis thus shows that long-distance phenomena in two seemingly different domains are actually of the same kind. This chapter defines culminativity as ‘exactly one stress per word’, which is one way in which the term has been understood in the past (see, for example, Hayes 1995). In other words, culminativity here encompasses both the ‘obligatory’ (at least one stress per word) and ‘culminative’ (at most one stress per word) properties discussed by Hyman (this volume).