Quickie about stress in Italian

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alice
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Quickie about stress in Italian

Post by alice »

1. How many levels of stress are generally recognised in Italian? (I think it may be three.)
2. How are these stresses assigned in a word with several pronominal clitics, such as fabbricamicelo?
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Re: Quickie about stress in Italian

Post by Acid Badger »

Clitics as in fabbrichiamocelo don't change stress, the verb is pronounced the same as fabbrichiamo without clitics.

I never formally studied Italian and just have shitty native speaker intuition, so I can't give a definite answer to the first question. But thinking about it real quick, I can think of: 1. Greek loans that retain unexpected stress, 2. words where final syllables have been lost in Italian (like città "city" and virtù "virtue"), 3. words like principe "prince" that derive from the Latin accusative but where disyllabic in the nominative and maybe retain initial stress because of this, and 4. words like mediterraneo "mediterranean" and meteo "weather forecast", where the second-to-last-rule maybe doesn't apply because the -e- is treated as kinda a semivowel on some abstract phonological level or something like that.

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Re: Quickie about stress in Italian

Post by Sumelic »

Acid Badger wrote:I never formally studied Italian and just have shitty native speaker intuition, so I can't give a definite answer to the first question. But thinking about it real quick, I can think of: 1. Greek loans that retain unexpected stress, 2. words where final syllables have been lost in Italian (like città "city" and virtù "virtue"), 3. words like principe "prince" that derive from the Latin accusative but where disyllabic in the nominative and maybe retain initial stress because of this, and 4. words like mediterraneo "mediterranean" and meteo "weather forecast", where the second-to-last-rule maybe doesn't apply because the -e- is treated as kinda a semivowel on some abstract phonological level or something like that.
I think the first question was asking about something a bit different: whether in polysyllabic words, it is common to analyze certain syllables other than the main stressed syllable as having "secondary" stress. E.g. some analyses of English would say that a word like "hypothetical" has secondary stress on the first syllable as well as primary stress on the third-to-last syllable.

Does Italian even have a second-to-last rule in general? I had the impression that penult vs. antepenult stress in Italian words of more than two syllables was unpredictable/complicatedly predictable to a similar degree as in English (which is sometimes analyzed as having default antepenult stress in polysyllables where the penult is light, but this isn't blatantly obvious to the intuition of a native speaker). The following paper seems to indicate that native speakers of Italian have different intuitions about which stress patterns to use for nonsense trisyllabic nouns that don't have heavy consonant clusters before the final syllable (it is apparently regular for a penult syllable closed by a coda consonant to attract the stress) : "Main Stress in Italian Nonce Nouns", by Martin Krämer.

But it seems like penult stress is strongly preferred for quadrisyllables, and preferred more for HLL trisyllables than it is for LLL trisyllables (Krämer explains this last result, which seems to conflict with the usual attraction of stress to heavy syllables, as a result of foot-based preferences.)

Hmm, that paper also seems to have some mention of secondary stress:
Krämer wrote: A dispute in the discussion of secondary stress helps here: while Vogel & Scalise (1982) provide an analysis of secondary stress in Italian, Bertinetto & Loporcaro (2005) deny its very existence. (p. 11)
Last edited by Sumelic on Tue Oct 03, 2017 4:43 pm, edited 10 times in total.

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Re: Quickie about stress in Italian

Post by mèþru »

@Acid Badger
WALS lists Italian as having irregular stress
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Re: Quickie about stress in Italian

Post by Sumelic »

Here's something I found on Google Books that says that secondary stress in Italian is optional, and cannot occur adjacent to the primary-stressed syllable: https://books.google.com/books?id=jaIVD ... an&f=false

It uses vowel neutralization data (the loss of the contrast between mid-close and mid-open vowels)

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