Abstract
Word stress in German is usually thought of as following the Germanic stress pattern (main stress on first stem syllable); quasi-monomorphemic words like Forélle or Holúnder suggest, however, that Modern German follows a Latinate stress pattern (last syllable extrametrical; stress on the penultima or the antepenultima, depending on weight of the second-to-last syllable). The change in stress pattern occurred in the 16th and 17th century, judging from evidence of metrical texts, due to a heavy influx of Latin and Romance loan words in this period, which followed the Latinate stress pattern and were taken as sample for the stressing of monomorphemic words longer than two syllables.
Highlights
German word stress in native words has been analyzed as following a ›Germanic‹ stress pattern, that is: a pattern which assigns the main word stress always to the first syllable
The change towards the Latin stress system occurred, judging from evidence from metrical texts, in the Renaissance and Early baroque period, a time, in which we see a heavy influx of loanwords into
In this paper I have tried to show that the default stress pattern of German simplex words Ð native and non-native words simultaneously Ð is basically identical with the Latin system
Summary
German word stress in native words has been analyzed as following a ›Germanic‹ stress pattern, that is: a pattern which assigns the main word stress always to the first syllable (excluding certain prefixes). If this is true, a German language learner would need a second rule system to assign word stress to foreign words such as e. While this is in itself not a problem (English speakers for instance clearly need several competing stress systems), it is not as attractive as a unified system would be on conceptual grounds. This paper is concerned with the details of this process
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