Stress Uniformity in Albanian: Morphological Arguments for Cyclicity

The uniformity of stress assignment across inflectional forms in Albanian leads to massive phonological opacity, which seems to lend itself either to paradigmatic output-output constraints (Benua 1997, McCarthy 2005) or to a stratal organization of phonology (Kiparsky 2000, Bermúdez-Otero 2008) where inflected word forms preserve the stress assigned to stems at an earlier stratum. In this article, I show that a detailed analysis of Albanian morphology provides strong evidence for a stratal account: stress position in inflected word forms is correctly predicted by their stems, but not by (partially defective) paradigms.