THE MARATHI STRESS: AN OPTIMALITY THEORETIC ACCOUNT OF WORD-STRESS IN MARATHI Dr Anusree Sreenivasan Assistant Professor Department of Linguistics and Contrastive Study of Tribal Languages Indira Gandhi National Tribal University, Amarkantak, M.P. anusreesreenivasan.07@gmail.com Abstract The present work aims to study the stress patterns in Marathi. The paper looks into the Dravidian/ Indo-Aryan dichotomy in the language. Marathi, though an Indo-Aryan language, shares features of Dravidian languages because of its geographically unique positioning of the area in which it is spoken. This paper investigates the stress pattern of the words in Marathi- disyllabic and trisyllabic words, and investigates which language family it follows in this case. The acoustic correlates of stress in Marathi are also delineated in the present work. This paper attempts to give an Optimality Theoretic account of the stress patterns in Marathi. Keywords: Marathi, word-stress, optimality theory. 0. Introduction Marathi is one of the major modern Indo-Aryan languages. It is one of the 22 scheduled languages on India. Marathi is spoken predominantly in the state of Maharashtra, traditionally called Dakshinapath “the avenue to the south” because of its unique geographic position. Maharashtra clearly has been viewed as a geographic, cultural, and linguistic link between the north and the south (Pandharipande 1997). Marathi is surrounded by Indo-Aryan languages such as Gujarati in the north and Hindi in the north and north-east, and Dravidian languages such as Kannada in the south and Telugu in the south and south-east. The language can thus be considered to be a link between the two major language families: Indo-Aryan in the north and Dravidian in the south. Marathi shares features of both Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages. Marathi has a large number of Sanskrit words in the lexicon. It has extensively borrowed from Kannada and Telugu as well. Apart from the lexicon, Marathi also shares syntactic and phonological features with both the language families. Since Marathi shows a blending of the features of these two language families, it has been claimed to be a pidgin by Southworth (1971). According to Grierson (1905), Marathi belongs to the ‘outer circle’ of Indo-Aryan languages. There are six major dialects of Marathi: Konkan Desi, Konkani, Desi, Varhadi, Nagpuri and Khandesi. The present work is based on the standard variety of Marathi spoken mainly in Pune. Even though some work has been done on Marathi phonology, it is mostly segmental. Marathi linguists like Ashok Kelkar and Rajeshwari Pandharipande have given some insights into the stress patterns of Marathi. Stress is not a prominent feature of Marathi and hence, is one of the least investigated areas of Marathi phonology. In this paper I investigate lexical stress in the language. The paper shows that Optimality Theory could explain the stress formation processes in Marathi with the help of properly ranked constraints.