morphological? - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

2. Strategies of stress assignment
When Italian native speakers are asked to assign stress to an Italian word, as for
example numero, we will certainly get the correct answer. But what about non-sense
words? Non-sense words lack a lexical entry and the reader of a non-sense word has
to arrive at a pronunciation for which no ready solution is available. S/he, therefore,
has to depend upon other strategies. In order to find out what kind of strategies these
are, a non-sense word reading task was performed to investigate the assignment of
stress to nonstored phonological forms.
2.1 Material
Non-sense words, in this context, should be understood to be wordlike forms that are
meaningless but readily pronounceable and conform to the phonotactic patterns of the
Italian language. Non-sense words are not listed in our mental lexicon and they have
never been encountered.
In accordance with Colombo (1992) and Laudanna et al. (1989), it is assumed that a
word is scanned from the final syllable backwards to the beginning of the word in
order to decide how to pronounce the whole word. The final syllable and the
penultimate syllable are here the most important parts because they are responsible for
the so-called ‘neighbourhood effect’, i.e. non-sense words are pronounced and
stressed in the same way as existing words with similar endings.
For the experiment three categories of non-sense words were constructed:
1) The first category contains words in which the suffix does exist in Italian but not
the base (e.g. matocale, farbozione).
This category was chosen to find out whether the base of a suffixed word has to be
analyzable in order to recognize the suffix and to stress this word correctly.
Three different kinds of suffixes were chosen:
- Suffixes that occur in many Italian words: -ione, -ale, -tore
- Suffixes that occur in (very) few Italian words: -ile, -ime, -ume
- Suffix-like endings: -cida, -teca, -iatra
Words with these endings have properties in common with both affixes
and words. On the one hand, they are derived from Greek or Latin words
where they represent words on their own and therefore might have more
lexical content than affixes. That’s why words with these elements are
often counted among compounds. On the other hand, like suffixes they are
bound morphemes. That’s why these endings are also called suffixoids.
Here it is suggested that with reference to stress these elements behave like
those suffixes that attract stress, i.e. they are stored with their stress.
2) The second category contains unsuffixed words where the penultimate syllable is
closed (e.g. nigormo, tonelvo).
3) The third category contains unsuffixed words where the penultimate syllable is
open (e.g. naldibo, sodipa).
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