Regularities and Oddities in Greek Binomials
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3765/amp.v9i0.5164Keywords:
Greek, End-weight, Weight, Prosody, Binomials, LapseAbstract
Our study looks into End-weight (EW) manifestations in Standard Modern Greek (Greek). EW refers to the tendency of certain constituents which pattern as heavy to occur closer to the right edge of the prosodic phrase, in order to align with its most prominent locus, nuclear stress (Ryan 2019). This phenomenon ties in with other known manifestations of the stress-weight interface in quantity-sensitive (QS) languages. We constructed two forced choice tasks – one with real words, the other with nonce words – aiming to explore the possible influence of vowel quality, word-final coda presence, and word length (in syllables) on the internal coordination of binomials. Our findings show that Greek manifests regular EW effects and words with back vowels, word-final codas, and more syllables pattern as heavy and are preferred closer to the right edge. The oddity mainly lies in the fact that in Greek, a quantity-insensitive language (QI), no constituents are expected to pattern as heavy. We further find that lapse effects might be more relevant in the language than previously believed. We theorize that our more experimentally-oriented approach to the language potentially reveals a gradient-weight system.
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Published by the LSA with permission of the author(s) under a CC BY 3.0 license.