morphological? - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

There do exist words in the Italian lexicon where the antepenultimate syllable is
stressed although the penultimate syllable is closed (e.g. mandorla, polizza, Lepanto,
Otranto) but these words are only very seldom and must be considered exceptions.
Therefore, the speakers’ pronunciations are unusual. I can only guess on the reason.
The non-sense words could have been stressed based on an existing model word.
Atirna could have reminded them of atona or atropa whereas for felarbe a similar
word couldn’t be found.
These two words can, however, be neglected in view of the huge majority of the nonsense
words in this category that is stressed on the penultimate syllable because they
only account for 0.82% of those non-sense words where the penultimate syllable is
closed.
That is, the results suggest that with words where the penultimate syllable is closed /
heavy this syllable normally receives stress.
2.3.2.2 Penultimate syllable open
Let’s have a look at the words where the penultimate syllable is open.
If the rule for stress assignment in Italian was syllable-counting, then non-sense word
production should result in penultimate stress pattern only in all subjects. This is what
indeed two subjects did. They always assigned stress to the penultimate syllable. All
other subjects, however, made a binary decision: they placed stress either on the
penultimate or the antepenultimate syllable of the non-sense word. Sometimes they
varied in the different runs, which suggests that they were not sure about stress
assignment.
When we look at the distribution of the different stress assignments, we can state that
69.39% of these non-sense words were stressed on the penultimate syllable and
30.61% on the antepenultimate syllable.
Graph 3: Stress assignment of the unsuffixed non-sense words with open
penultimate syllable
80,00%
60,00%
40,00%
20,00%
0,00%
Open penultimate syllable
Penultimate syllable
stressed
Antepenultimate
syllable stressed
Especially in this category it was not easy to find non-sense words since many
suffixes have the form -VCV and they cover already an array of endings (e.g. -ato, -
eto, -ito, -oto, -uto, -ale, -ile, -ule, -amo, -ame, -ano, -eno, -ino, -ara, -are, -aro, -ita, -
ite, -ito, -ivo, -osi, -oso, -ota, -ule, -ume etc.). With other endings that do not occur or
occur only seldom in words, as for example -uvo, -ige, -ovo, -ufa, Italian native
speakers were of the opinion that they didn’t sound Italian. So there had to be chosen
endings that do occur more often, but then these endings were combined with letters
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