Stress Stability Under Cliticization and the Prosodic Status of Romance Clitics

Stressed postverbal pronominals in Catalan

“…In Neapolitan Italian, the prosodic word (PW) is recursive in cases in which the group has two pronominals, and the pronominals may form a metrical Loporcaro's (2000) analysis posits that the different behavior between languages with stress stability vs. stress shift is due to a parametric difference concerning the assignment of stress. Languages with stress shift would have the capacity to assign stress to the prosodic word lexically and post-lexically, whereas in those with stress stability post-lexical reassignment of stress would not be possible.…”

“…Various formal phonological analyses have been proposed to account for the stress shift patterns observed (impressionistically) in Romance varieties (see, e. g., Kenstowicz 1991;Loporcaro 2000;Peperkamp 1995Peperkamp , 1997Ordóñez and Repetti 2006, and references therein). For Neapolitan, Peperkamp (1995) notes that "a string consisting of a verb and two enclitics surfaces with main word stress on the first of the clitics, regardless of the location of stress on the verb.…”

2. Segmental phenomena and their interactions: Evidence for prosodic organization and the architecture of grammar

“…However, Loporcaro (2000) and Vigário (2003, 333) point out that if stress placement in Standard Italian is a lexical process and pronominal clitics are syntactic words (and not affixes) which combine with their hosts post-lexically, the mere fact that verb-clitic combinations are not present at the lexical component of phonology accounts for the non-application of lexical phonological processes. Loporcaro (2000) further shows that, like in Standard Italian, in Algherese (a Catalan dialect spoken in Sardinia), pronominal clitics do not affect stress placement either. However, post-lexical processes, such as vowel epenthesis, reveal that in this dialect enclitics are indeed integrated within the host prosodic word.…”

“…Loporcaro 2000 for a critical view), Loporcaro (2000) for Algherese, Romanesco and Friulian, three Romance varieties spoken in Italy, Bisol (2000; and Schwindt (2008) for BPor, and Vigário (2003) for EPor. The next level of prosodic hierarchy that constrains segmental processes is the Prosodic Word Group (Vigário 2010), or, in other approaches, the Clitic Group or the Composite Group (Nespor/Vogel 1986/2007and Vogel 2009.…”

“…According to Loporcaro (2000), vowel harmony in this dialect is a PW-bound process affecting word-final non-low vowels, which harmonize in height to the stressed vowel. This is illustrated in (15) Notice that processes like these may be crucial to determine how particular words (like clitics) and morphemes (like affixes) are prosodized (e.g.…”