Stress shift under cliticization in Nuorese Sardinian

Abstract

In most Romance languages clitics are stress neutral: when they attach to a host, they have no effect on stress placement: this is the case of Italian and Spanish. However, a small group of Romance languages is exceptional in this respect, e.g., Neapolitan and some Catalan, Occitan and Lucanian varieties. Sardinian is among them. Sardinian varieties display stress shift under cliticization in the imperative and gerund forms. Differences can be found across these varieties with respect to stress placement (Lai 2016). Here we will focus on the behaviour of Nuorese Sardinian, a variety from the central-northern area of the island of Sardinia. We will show that Sardinian varieties are unique in the Romance domain because they display stress shift not only with enclitics but also with proclitics. This is evidence for the proposal that Sardinian clitic clusters (both in enclisis and proclisis) constitute a prosodic word of their own.