Armenian stress: A case for (prosodic) stems Hossep Dolatian Stony Brook University 1 Introduction Prosodic phonology argues that phonological processes apply within phonological domains or constituents (P-constituents) which are derived from morpho-syntactic structure (Nespor & Vogel 1986; Selkirk 2011). The traditional prosodic hierar- chy has the Prosodic Word (PWord) 1 as the lowest morphologically-derived P- constituent (Vogel 2008). Most mainstream approaches (Ito & Mester 2009; Selkirk 2011) argue that there are only three P-constituents: the prosodic word (PWord), the prosodic phrase (PPhrase), and the intonational phrase (ip). This paper argues that these three constituents are not enough. We demonstrate on the basis of Armenian that an additional P-constituent which is sublexical or below the PWord is needed, the prosodic stem (PStem) 2 . Although the PStem’s existence is controversial (Vogel 2016), it has been argued to exist in multiple agglutinative languages (Downing 2016) and data from Armenian will show that the PStem is a required P-constituent and should be part of the Prosodic Hierarchy. Armenian is a primarily suffixing Indo-European language with agglutinative nominal morphology. It has two dialect families, Western Armenian (WA) and East- ern Armenian (EA), each with its own standard dialect. In this paper, we analyze two prosodic processes across the two standard dialects, 3 primary stress assign- ment and destressed high vowel reduction, and describe the various phonological and morphological factors which control these two processes. The data shows that an adequate model that accounts for the domains of these two processes and for their dialectal differences requires access to both the phonological word (PWord) and the phonological stem (PStem). This paper is structured as follows. We first provide basic descriptive data on Armenian word-level prosody (§2). This includes both stress assignment (§2.1) and vowel reduction (§2.2). Vowel reduction is quite complicated and is affected by complex phonological (§2.2.1) and morphological factors (§2.2.2). We move on to describe the prosodic domains for these two processes (§3). We crucially show that the domain of vowel reduction cannot be either the PWord (§3.2) or a recursive 1 Throughout this paper, we will interchangeably use the terms prosodic word, phonological word, PW, and PWord. 2 Throughout this paper, we will interchangeably use the terms prosodic stem, phonological stem, PS, and PStem. 3 Western and Eastern Armenian are distinguished by a set of consonant shifts between them, e.g. Western k h irk h vs. Eastern girk h ‘book’. For reasons of space and readability, all consonants in the examples are transcribed in the WA variant. We do not mark aspiration either. Aspiration and the difference in consonants between the dialects does not affect stress or vowel reduction. Proceedings of CLS 53 (2017), 39-53 c  Chicago Linguistic Society 2018. All rights reserved. 39