Stress distribution in Italian verbs
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| Year of publication | 2026 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | The puzzle In Italian, stress placement is traditionally argued to be determined by an interaction between lexical stress and a default stress assignment algorithm that places stress on the penulti- mate syllable, which applies only when there is no lexical stress. We maintain that a straightforward analysis can be provided that builds on four main ingredients: i) both roots and morphemes can be lexically specified as stress-inactive or stress-active, namely they can bear a stressed vowel (or not) or be pre-/post-stressing, ii) the right-most stress-active morpheme suppresses the stress-activity of morphemes on the left, iii) there must be (only) one stress per cycle, i.e. each time an affix is concatenated, and iv) if no morpheme is stress-active, stress is assigned to the right-most vowel. More precisely, assuming nanosyntax, we maintain that stress assignment goes through the following derivational steps: 1. Merger and lexicalisation of the root (a) If the root bears lexical stress, no default stress assignment (b) If the root bears no lexical stress, assign stress to the final vowel 2. Merger of the next feature(s) 3. (Lexicalisation-driven) movement of the root across the last merged feature 4. Lexicalisation of the newly merged feature(s) (a) If the newly added morpheme is stress-active, overwrite the stress of the previous cycle (b) If the newly added morpheme is not stress-active, keep the stress of the previous cycle This system allows us to derive the stress distribution patterns displayed by Italian verbs with one single mechanism, i.e. one single grammar that applies iteratively to phonological domains that closely reflects the steps of the relevant morpho-syntactic derivation. This improves on previously proposed analyses that resort to Output-Output constrains1, as well as on Stratal OT approaches, for it does not explode factorial typology (as OO), and it assumes only one grammar. |
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