morphological? - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

In two speakers as well as in the pronunciations of some non-sense words the
dominant penultimate stress pattern of Italian seems to become the default
selection, i.e. stress is assigned to the penultimate syllable.
3. Stress assignment in the vocabulary
As has already been mentioned Schwarze (2006) examined a small corpus of threesyllable
words (451 items). However, in order to find out what the proportions in a
larger number of words are, Christine Kaschny is currently analyzing more than
10,000 entries (= ® DISC base = words ‘di alta disponibilità’).” The words are
analyzed in their citation forms, except verbs; the form analyzed is the 3rd person
singular of the Present tense. The domain always is the phonological word; i.e.
prefixes and the first constituent of compounds are considered as being outside the
window of stress assignment.
In accordance with the experimental study presented above (section 1), the decision
has to be made for each word whether it is morphologically complex. And in
accordance with section 2, it is assumed that the stress assigning algorithm also may
segment words into a suffix and the rest, even if the rest is opaque, like in azione
‘action’, where the string -zione/-ione can be identified with the suffix contained in
e.g. presentazione ‘presentation’.
As has been pointed out above (section 1), it is the goal of such a vocabulary analysis
to find out to which extent the rule-based approach to stress assignment correctly
predicts the attested data.
In order to carry out this analysis, a specific problem of Italian phonology must be
resolved. Since we hypothesize a syllable-based rule of stress assignment, we need to
be able to exhaustingly and unequivocally analyze all words of the corpus into
syllables. But at the level of auditive observation, many Italian words show variable
syllabification, and the information contained in dictionary transcriptions is not
reliable. The words concerned are those that end with an unstressed sequence of what,
in writing, are the letters for a high plus a low vowel, cf. [i."ta….li.a] or [i."ta….lja] Italia
‘Italy’, [ne.tSEs."sa…ri.o] or [ne.tSEs."sa…rjo] necessario ‘necessary’, ["va….ku.o] or
["va….kwo] vacuo ‘vacuous’, [kon."ti….nu.o] or [kon."ti….nwo] continuo ‘I continue’. It is
crucial to know whether the high segment is a glide—then it is the onset of a
syllable—or a full vowel—then it is the nucleus of a light syllable.
Our hypotheses include the following:
i. The level of stress assignment
Stress is assigned to lexical representations, rather than to surface forms.
This hypothesis is motivated by the fact that main word stress does not seem to be
sensible to post-lexical variation, such as final vowel deletion. When post-lexical
variation of stress, does occur, as in dottóre ‘doctor’ vs. dòttor Róssi ‘doctor Rossi’, it
is due to a stress clash, which is a consequence of final vowel deletion. The
postlexical rule of final vowel deletion as such does not concern stress; cf. dottóre
‘doctor’ vs. dottór Martíni ‘doctor Martini’ where there is no stress clash.
ii. Lexical representations of glides
The Italian glides, [j] and [w], have no symmetrical distribution. The front glide, [j],
appears as or in the onset, also between vowels (1), and in the coda (2):
(1) [j] as onset or part of the onset
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