ON ACCENT IN THE ITALIC LANGUAGES: NATURE, POSITION, AND HISTORY

Abstract

The Italic languages show a number of cases of vowel reduction and deletion. When working on the actual data, it is crucial to understand the role that accent played in such phonological changes. As for the qualitative nature of Italic accent, recent typological studies suggest that the Italic accent most likely had a dominant stress nature, rather than pitch nature, in the period when vowel reduction and deletion took place. The fact that these changes occurred primarily in non-initial syllables strongly supports the hypothesis that initial syllables were consistently stressed at some point in the history of Italic. Objections to this theory should thus be rejected as groundless. The systematic difference between the initial-stress rule of Pre-Literary Latin and the Penultimate Law of Literary Latin can also be explained within a metrical framework. On the other hand, although it is not immediately clear whether Sabellic acquired an accentual system like that of Literary Latin, the long-vowel notations in Oscan and Umbrian seem to point to the retention of the older system.