Stress and word order in Asian languages with reference to the Linguistic Atlas of Asia

This paper gives an overview of the Linguistic Atlas of Asia (LAA) (Endo et al. 2021) and examines the hypothesis of stress-order correlation (Tokizaki 2011 et seq.) based on its descriptions of Asian languages. Generalizing the idea of holistic typology by Bally (1944) (German vs. French) and Donegan and Stampe (1983) (Munda vs. Mon-Khmer), Tokizaki (2011 et seq.) proposes the hypothesis that word-stress location correlates with word order (head-initial/head-final) in the world’s languages: languages with word-initial stress have head-final order (OV, postposition, suffixing, modifier-noun) while languages with word-final order have head-initial order (e.g. VO, preposition, prefixing, noun-modifier). In this paper, I examine the word-stress location in each group of Asian languages described in Chapter 7 on tone and accent in LAA. Analyzing more descriptions of stress in literature other than LAA and the word order data in Dryer (2013a, b, c, d, e, f, g) in the World Atlas of Linguistic Structure Online (WALS), I argue that the stress-order correlation hypothesis generally holds in Asian languages. It is also argued that word-stress location correlates with word order because the word-stress pattern is projected onto the phrase-stress pattern where the main stress universally falls on the complement rather than the head (e.g. on O rather than on V in a verb phrase) (cf. Cinque 1993).