Stress on Second Conjugation Infinitives in Italian

The Destiny of Latin Second Conjugation Infinitives in Romance

“…What we ask the specialist to focus on now is the fact that the data across the languages studied here taken in their entirety are persuasive, the more so since we have not appealed to accounts that hold for only a single Romance language and not generally across Romance. Furthermore, the experiment reported on in Davis, Manganaro, and Napoli (1987) gives conclusive evidence that the template's effect is potent today in Italian. The important fact is that polysyllabic roots, CVC roots where the onset C is a sonorant, and CVCC roots do not occur in the special infinitive or conjugation class in any modern Romance language we have examined.…”

“…Second, Davis, Manganaro, and Napoli (1987) (hereafter DMN) conducted an experiment (reported on in section l below) that shows Brought to you by | Nanyang Technological University Authenticated Download Date | 5/31/15 11:03 AM that native Speakers of Italian today are sensitive to the template. No list account of the special verb class is consistent with these results.…”

Syllable onsets as a factor in stress rules: the case of Mathimathi revisited

“…Mathimathi is not the only language that has been cited as an alleged onset-sensitive stress system. The other cases discussed in this context include Piraha (Everett & Everett 1984a, b), Western Aranda (Strehlow 1942;Davis 1985Davis , 1988Downing 1993Downing , 1995Goedemans 1996), Italian (Davis et al 1987) and English (Nanni 1977). This paper is not an attempt to provide new analyses for any of these cases.…”

Chapter 11 Representational complexity in syllable structure and its consequences for GEN and CON

“…Evidence for the rimal status of pre-peak consonants might also be found in a language that takes the Iglesias Campidanian pattern one step farther, such that high-sonority segments other than glides are also driven into the rimal-onglide position by *ONSET/X constraints. Stress-related evidence for a pattern of this type may exist: Davis, Manganaro, and Napoli (1987) argue that Italian second-conjugation infinitive verbs treat the antepenultimate syllable as heavy if its onset is a sonorant. This example appears to be morphologically restricted, but even so, it may be a case of *ONSET/X constraints for X$NASAL forcing pre-peak sonorants into the rime.…”