PERSISTENCE OF THE LATIN ACCENT IN THE NOMINAL ...

CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION: THE PROSODIC WORD
Approaches to Word Level Accent
Although it is difficult to find a single, universal definition of accent, there is cross-
linguistic recognition of the prominence of a syllable within the word or lexical unit. The basis
of that prominence, however, is rarely unidimensional. Rather, various factors including pitch,
duration, and intensity coalesce to place a syllable in relief (Beckman 1986; Von Coetsem 1996;
Crosswhite 2001; Kager 1995). Studies of word level accent, cross-linguistic as well as language
specific, have offered insights into the typology of accent, its assignment at word level, including
predictability, iterability of metric feet, and restrictions imposed by morphology and phonology
(Beckman 1986; Von Coetsem 1996; Delgado Martins 1982; Fox 2000; Harris 1992; Hayes
1995; Liberman and Prince 1977). This study examines the perseverance of the original locus
of accent in nouns of Latin origin as they are reflected in Castilian, Catalan, and Portuguese and
the changing nature of that accent from a system of moraic trochees to one which derives its
binarity from the presence of two-syllables defaulting to one heavy syllable when it is not
possible otherwise to build a prosodic foot at the right word edge.
The selection of nouns for this study presents several advantages: they constitute a corpus
of sufficient size (approximately 3,600 items that were found to have correspondences in all
three Ibero-Romance languages) and are by and large unencumbered by morphological variants
in the declension cases that pass into Romance, primarily accusative and occasionally
nominative, that would alter computation of the primary accent. Analysis of the Latin input
forms and the three-way output forms in Castilian, Catalan, and Portuguese is effected using core
principles of metrical theory in the framework of optimality theory (hereafter OT) in order to
describe the nature of the Latin accent as well as project differences in constraints and priorities
22