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A footless stroll through Italian stress

  • Noam Faust ORCID logo EMAIL logo and Shanti Ulfsbjorninn ORCID logo
Published/Copyright: November 19, 2024
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Abstract

Despite the fact that Italian has been studied intensely for many years, the intricate relationship between its syllable structure and its metrical facts (weight and stress assignment) still poses a very significant formal challenge to previously published theoretical accounts. In this paper, we provide a novel account of Italian stress within the framework of Strict CV Metrics. We show that this approach most accurately captures the empirical data of the language, while providing a formally simple analysis which does not require feet, binary or ternary. The analysis is computationally simple and derives the ‘three syllable’ window effect without arbitrarily stipulating the foot-size of the language or overgenerating forms.


Corresponding author: Noam Faust, Université Paris 8, CNRS SFL, Saint-Denis, France, E-mail:

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Published Online: 2024-11-19
Published in Print: 2024-11-26

© 2024 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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