morphological? - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

The only clear constraint that emerges from Table 1 is the fact that stress in Italian cannot go
beyond the antepenult 3 .
Some schemes are marked, however:
oxytons:
o are uninflected
o are either borrowed (cf. Perù, bordeaux [']) or contain a suffix (which may be
transparent or not, the only one productive today is –ità).
the mándorla type:
o only a handful of examples in the Italian lexicon: Táranto, Ótranto, Lévanto, city
names, pólizza, (‘insurance contract’) (but cf. below).
But how to establish a preference for the distinction amíco vs. sólido?
Two concurrent hypotheses:
(a) a unique unmarked stress pattern with exceptions
i. the unmarked stress is on the penult, the other patterns are marked (Den Os & Kager
1986, Jacobs 1994, Sluyters 1990, D’Imperio & Rosenthall 1999, Roca 1999, among
others);
ii. Italian follows the Latin algorithm: « penult if heavy or underlyingly accented,
antepenult otherwise » (Guerzoni 2000).
The interest of these assumptions is that they allow a uniform analysis in terms of feet:
Binarity (a foot is always binary: more than one stress pattern, , )
Uniformity of Algorithm (a language has only one type of feet, in Italian typically a
bisyllabic trochee).
(b) include different feet types in the inventory of Italian, e.g. ternary feet like the dactyl (× . .)
(Burzio 1994, Bafile 1999, Marotta 1999), and consider that none of them is the unmarked
one.
What about stress assignment under (b)?
for complex words the morphological rule itself assigns stress:
(12) távolo tavolíno
‘table’ ‘small table’
átomo atómico
‘atom’ ‘atomic’
in most cases words ending in a sequence identical to a suffix are stressed according to the
same pattern:
3 The only exceptions are some clitic groups (teléfonagli, ‘phone to him’), and 3rd person plurals of some verbs
(teléfonano, ‘they phone’).
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