SIL Mexico

Seri, a language isolate spoken in northwestern Mexico, regularly assigns stress to the penultimate syllable of a root; affixes are not relevant for determining the placement of stress. A heavy final syllable in the root attracts stress, however, although a final consonant is extrametrical. The final consonant of a word is relevant for the minimal word condition that major class lexical items respect, as this paper shows. Some roots have extrametrical final syllables and a few roots have exceptional stress. This paper documents these facts with audio recordings.