This paper seeks to provide a unified account of stress and related processes in Carib (Hoff 1968) by making use of prosodic phonology and Optimality Theory. Previous prosodic analyses of Carib (Visch 1996, van der Hulst and Visch 1992, Inkelas 1989, and van de Vijver 1998) have attempted to explain its complicated prosodic processes, but not only do these accounts conflict with each other, none have succeeded in unifying the stress assignment phenomena with a single, concise explanation. Central to the discussion in this paper is the idea of the "stress window", where stress assignment and various related processes are limited to a particular subpart of the word. These processes can be limited to the appropriate domain in Carib if Carib prosodic structure contains a colon layer between the foot and prosodic word layers. This allows for a single explanation for several related processes of Carib phonology.

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