The primacy of the weak in Carib prosody

Accents are normally associated with the lexically stressed syllable of a word. The Carib language (Cornelis Kondre dialect) is an exception. Instead of association, we there find dissociation of accent and stress. Accentuation may go to many places inside a word, but never to its lexically stressed syllable. As phonetic correlate of stress I relied on the conspicuous difference in duration between the first and the second syllable that characterizes nearly all Carib words. Accentuation I held to be the result of prominence-lending pitch changes. The regularity stated in the first paragraph was tested by comparing the size of pitch changes during the stress-bearing first foot with those beyond the first foot.