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What are possible ways of a language with stress fixed on one syllable to develop lexical stress (the one with different positions in each word), or to shift fixed stress position to another one?
I thought about stress being moved to syllables with a specific tone(s), or one preserved on its position in one element of a compound, but I'd like to know, if these ideas are realistic, and whether there are other motivations of stress shift.

The Germanic languages have accomplished it by borrowing lots of words from languages with different stress rules -- mostly Romance languages -- and partly or completely preserving those stress rules for the borrowed words. It's very telling that Icelandic, by far the Germanic language with the fewest loanwords, is also to my knowledge the only Germanic variety that doesn't have phonemic stress. Even Faroese has some words with stress on non-initial syllables.

Syllable loss may be one.
For example if the stress is always on the penultimate syllable, and through sound changes, either it or the last syllable gets lost.

(Hypothetical) e.g.
/ba.'ba.ha/ > /h/ gets lost > /ba.'ba:/

stress shifts to the last syllable

Syllable length and weighting can also affect stress. But yeah - syllable loss is a good way to go.

Another example may be two words merging together.

E.g.:
/'oʊ.vəɻ/ + /'vju/ = /'oʊ.vəɻ.vju/

stress shifts to first syllable

Some Goidelic dialects shift stress to syllables with long vowels or diphthongs (and also, oddly, syllables containing /ax/):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_phonology#Stress
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manx_language#Stress

AnTeallach wrote:Some Goidelic dialects shift stress to syllables with long vowels or diphthongs (and also, oddly, syllables containing /ax/):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_phonology#Stress
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manx_language#Stress

Interesting! I'm well acquainted with the Munster stress rules since that's the dialect I speak, but I never would've guessed there were parallels in Manx. It's so Scottish-Gaelicky in most respects.

As others have said, syllable loss is the most common mechanism that I can think of. But then how did East Slavic develop lexical stress? All the Slavic languages lost unstressed vowels, but West Slavic still has fixed stress (initial in Czech, penultimate in Polish).

What about how Latin shifted from PIE's phonemic stress to initial stress to (ante)penultimate stress? What cause shifts of that sort?

linguoboy wrote:As others have said, syllable loss is the most common mechanism that I can think of. But then how did East Slavic develop lexical stress? All the Slavic languages lost unstressed vowels, but West Slavic still has fixed stress (initial in Czech, penultimate in Polish).

Because it's the other way round. Balto-Slavic inherited lexical stress from PIE - the feature, not the details; in both Baltic and Slavic the acccentuation patterns evolved further so that it's difficult to trace the stress in any individual Baltic or Slavic lexeme back to PIE. Here's a short overview article; if you're really interested, there's a vast literature and also some quasi-religious differences about the exact developments. Fixed stress is a special development of West Slavic and even some West Slavic languages (e.g. the Northern Kashubian dialects) kept lexical stress. The old accentuation system influenced the distinction of long and short vowels in Czech, Slovak and Old Polish. BTW, the penultimate stress of Polish is supposed to have been preceded by a period of initial stress (retained in Southern Malopolski dialects) - so the development was spread of initial accent to almost all Western Slavic languages (including Czech, Slovak, Sorbian, Southern Kashubian and Old Polish) and then spread of penultimate accent in a partial area of this, encompassing most, but not all, of the Polish dialects.

Jetboy wrote:What about how Latin shifted from PIE's phonemic stress to initial stress to (ante)penultimate stress? What cause shifts of that sort?

This happened in a lot of IE languages in Europe. It is often seen as a substrate-induced development, i.e. the original population learning IE languages didn't learn the complicated accent patterns but substituted a simple accent rule, that perhaps was typical of their own, pre-IE languages. Even if one doesn't accept the theory of substrate - influence (substrates got a bit of a bad name in IE studies because they became the handwavium of IE studies in the first half of the 20th century - "We can't explain feature X? Must be substrate influence"), I think it's reasonable to see the introduction of fixed accent patterns as a simplification process, similar to case syncretism or other processes of levelling of distinctions.

And then the predictable stress placement in Classical Latin got replaced by phonemic stress in Spanish, again, mainly to syllable loss: amé (<amāvī) vs. ame (<amem), ama (<amat, amā) vs. amá (̄<amāte).

On the other hand, it changed to predictable stress in the final syllable in many dialects of French, including the standard, due to massive syllable loss—every syllable after the stressed vowel got killed. And in those that do have paroxytones, it's because there's just some final schwa representing a past unstressed vowel.

hwhatting wrote:

Jetboy wrote:What about how Latin shifted from PIE's phonemic stress to initial stress to (ante)penultimate stress? What cause shifts of that sort?

This happened in a lot of IE languages in Europe. It is often seen as a substrate-induced development… I think it's reasonable to see the introduction of fixed accent patterns as a simplification process, similar to case syncretism or other processes of levelling of distinctions.

Well, right, but that still doesn't explain the shift from initial to (ante)penultimate. I mean, I find it hard to imagine that syllable loss would have played a role there, since even if the ultima is lost, the first syllable is still the first syllable.

Jetboy wrote:Well, right, but that still doesn't explain the shift from initial to (ante)penultimate. I mean, I find it hard to imagine that syllable loss would have played a role there, since even if the ultima is lost, the first syllable is still the first syllable.

Syllable loss isn't the only way to change stress patterns. One hypothesis could be that a propensity of dactylic words (Heavy-Light-Light) could cause a re-analysis of stress.