morphological? - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

The features which are under evaluation include segmental, prosodic, morphosyntactic and
semantic features.
“Given the large scale of unpredictable stress in Italian we can assume that faithfulness to
underlying stress dominates most of the constraints that determine stress placement” [Krämer
to appear].
What is an “underlying stress” if not a lexematic stress? In surface-to-surface terms,
faithfulness operates between various surface forms of neighboring words; cf. output-output
effects in (16) and (18). Note that it is not a contradiction, if we consider that a lexeme does
not consist of a basic form from which the others are derived, but rather a network of
connected word forms.
Some data in this direction are cases of final vowel truncation (cf. Meinschaefer 2007) in (28),
and some possible exceptions to (19) in (29)
(28) capitáre capitàr
‘happen-INFIN’
capitiámo capitiàm
‘happen-1PL PRES’
cápitano cápitan
‘happen-3PL PRES’
temére temér
‘fear-INFIN’
crédere créder
‘believe-INFIN’
(29) Word Forms Neighbor
Diabolik
[']
[']
diabólico
Titanic [']
[']
titánico
For the data in (29) one could invoke the faithfulness to a presumed source language
(English). However: -Diabolik is an Italian comics character, which is spelled differently from
the English diabolic; -the pronunciation of both these words is not segmentally faithful to the
English one (in particular, there is no diphthong in the first syllable).
Consequence: lexical marking on lexemes is made on the stem for nominals (nouns and
adjectives) and on one of the stems for verbs (typically, one of the stems of the present
indicative):
130