final mora of a stem-final vowel, the subsequent morpheme is unstressed. If the first stressed morpheme has its accent of the stem-final vowel mora, that morpheme loses its stress. If the morpheme following the first stress lacks lexical stress, the stress remains on the first morpheme. If a stress stem-final vowel is deleted when the following morpheme lacks lexical stress, the stress is transferred to the preceding vowel mora of the deleted vowel. Exceptions: A few stems with final falling accent have long high stress for the purposes of word formation. The punctual aspectual marker áhi overrides the regular word accent - it is always accented The exclamative sentence-final marker wík is stressed in addition to the stress of the stem to which it is combined. Vowel morae that occur between the first stress and the exclamative suffix are low in pitch. Phonological processes Phonological processes in Crow include: short vowel deletion: stem-final short vowels are deleted at a morpheme boundary unless a three-consonant cluster or a nasal plus voiceless obstruent would occur. Stem-final vowels do not delete before dak, the coordinate noun-phrase conjunction. Sentence-final evidential suffixes also do not cause the final short vowel to be deleted. nasal assimilation: n assimilates to m in a cluster; nm clusters do not occur. sibilant assimilation: alveolar s and ss are realized as /sh/ at morpheme boundaries before all consonants except x and s. vowel neutralization: word-finally, stem-final short vowels i, a and u are neutralized to their corresponding mid nonround or round vowel: i, a become e; u becomes o. identical vowel reduction: with suffixes beginning with a, sequences of 3-4 identical vowel morae are reduced to two (aa-a and aa-aa are reduced to aa); exceptions are compounds and prefixes. long vowel reduction before h: long vowels shorten before h in a syllable coda. final schwa deletion: the final schwa of a diphthong is deleted before suffixes beginning with a and before the plural; before other vowels, it is otherwise retained. palatal-dental alternation: stem-final ch and t are complementary; t occurs before a-initial suffixes and plural u, and ch everywhere else. This relations holds parallel for š - s; and geminates čč and šš. The č and š alternates occur before nonlow vowels, whereas t and s occur before low vowels. There are, however, a few exceptions to this complementary relationship, therefore these phonemes cannot be considered as allophones. palatal-velar alternation: