Antepenultimate stress in Italian and some related dialects: metrical and prosodic aspects

The paper deals with the representation of antepenultimate stress by taking into account various kinds of data from Italian and some Southern Italian dialects. Ternary alternations in Italian varieties are here analysed, and particular attention is devoted to non-lexical stress assignment, which can be observed in the adaptation of foreign loan-words and in the pronunciation of English by Italian speakers. On the base of these facts, the proposal is here advanced that antepenultimate stress in these languages should not be forced into a binary structure, corresponding to the trochaic foot, and that the appropriate metrical representation for this stress pattern should be a ternary, trisyllabic constituent. In the second part of the paper, this hypothesis on the representation of ternary stress is checked in the light of quantitative phenomena concerning some Southern Italian dialects, whereby the position of main stress in the word affects the length of the stressed vowel. While a stre...