morphological? - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

Graph 1: Stress assignment of the suffixed non-sense words
-ione, -ale, -tore
100,00%
80,00%
60,00%
40,00%
20,00%
0,00%
With the suffixes that occur very often only the suffix -ione was stressed on the
penultimate syllable in all cases. However, the suffixes -ale and -tore seem not to
have been recognized by all speakers because sometimes we get pronunciations like
matocale, boffale and magetore, tanottore. However, the huge majority of the existing
words that end in -tore and -ale are stressed on the penultimate syllable 1 . Therefore, it
is suggested that the suffixes -ale and -tore were not always recognized as suffixes
and in these cases the stress assignment rule was applied that assigns stress to the
antepenultimate syllable when the penultimate syllable is open.
-ile, -ime, -ume
The suffixes -ile, -ime and -ume don’t occur very often in the Italian lexicon and
accordingly were less often recognized than e.g. -ione. Here mainly the non-sense
words with the suffixes -ile and -ime were stressed on the antepenultimate syllable
(e.g. rissipile, macodile, gerezile and etosime, glubime, asipime) but also non-sense
words with the ending -ume (e.g. pasogume, tarisume).
-cida, -teca, -iatra
In the lexicon the endings -cida, -teca and -iatra are normally stressed on the
penultimate syllable. 2 However, the non-sense words that end in -cida and -teca were
several times stressed on the antepenultimate syllable (e.g. teroteca, sirrateca,
quimoteca and ostocida). The ending -iatra was only once pronounced by one subject
as balofiatra.
Here it is also suggested that these endings were not always recognized and therefore
the stress assignment rule was applied that assigns stress to the antepenultimate
syllable when the penultimate syllable is open.
1 For both suffixes there are words in the lexicon that are stressed on the antepenultimate syllable, e.g.
for -tore there is e.g. mentore, nestore or stentore and for -ale there is e.g. cannibale, scitale or segale.
However, these words only account for about 0.4% of all words ending in -tore and about 0.6% of all
words ending in -ale in the ® DISC intero ( ® DISC intero = Dizionario Italiano Sabatini Colletti, it
comprises more than 100,000 entries).
2 For the ending -cida there is, however, one word in the ® DISC intero that is stressed on the
antepenultimate syllable, namely soccida.
Suffixed non-sense words
Penultimate
syllable stressed
Antepenultimate
syllable stressed
215