Stress as a proclitic in Modern Greek

Abstract

Virtually all past tense forms of the Greek verb are characterised by antepenultimate stress. This fact is problematic for standard views of the prosody–morphology interface in Greek, for which it is usually assumed that inflectional categories cannot uniquely determine the stress pattern of a word. Furthermore, antepenultimate stress is not otherwise known as an effect of affixal morphology. It is proposed that we can understand the behaviour of past tense if we assume that past tense is a proclitic consisting of a segmentally empty foot only. It is shown how this analysis fits in with our current morphosyntactic and phonological knowledge of the structure of the Greek verb.