fire – water – earth – the sun ~ – today, morning – misty rain – meat Verb stems typically have primary stress on the ultimate syllable, as well. The two major exceptions are reduplicated verbs, which have equal stress on both the last and reduplicated syllables of the stem, and verb compounds with the head root , in which primary stress is syllable-initial. Some examples include: – to hold it up – light Intonation Intonation varies depending upon the kinds of sentences being uttered. Declarative, negative, and command speech acts have falling intonation, while information questions and yes/no questions have rising pitch. Morphologically, intonation can also change the reception of a word and its intended meaning, as we see in the following example of three different intonation patterns for the word "What": – "What?" (requesting information) – "What?" (didn't hear) – "What?" (frightened/surprised) Contractions One of the most significant aspects of Yuchi morphophonology is the prevalence of contractions. Contraction should not here be taken to mean only a shortening of words; rather, it is more useful to think of contraction as a deletion of sounds that in turn affects surrounding vowels. What can be contracted is dependent upon two major factors, the sound which begins the contracted syllable, and the stress of the syllable. In order for a syllable to be contracted, it must begin with a [+sonorant] consonant, that is, a voiced sound with a relatively free passage of air. In Yuchi, this includes sounds such as (where indicates a glottalized sound), the fricative , and . A syllable must also be unstressed in order to contract. Contraction causes phonetic changes in the vowels directly preceding the deleted syllable. In order for Yuchi speakers to understand the grammatical features of the words being used in contracted forms, vowel features alternate to match the deleted sounds. So, for example, if the morpheme was contracted, the vowel preceding it would become nasalized to indicate that a nasal sound has been lost. Contraction must necessarily come before the phonetic change in vowels. For example, consider the following word: – 'Did you look in the box?' can contract here because it is an unstressed syllable beginning with a sonorant: . CCC clusters are relatively rare, occurring in only six variations as noted by Wolff, four of them beginning with fricatives; such a construction as above would therefore likely be odd to speakers