Word stress patterns in Icelandic and Faroese
The traditional pattern for West Nordic word stress is initial stress, but in both languages foreign patterns of non‐initial stress have been adopted in parts of the vocabulary. The main theme of the chapter is the interplay and division of labour between the traditional patterns and the new ones. In some cases it seems like postlexical (non‐initial or right strong) stress patterns are applied so as to imitate foreign patterns with non‐initial stress. But in many cases, particularly in Faroese, these patterns have been lexicalized, suggesting that a fundamental change has taken place in the system of word stress, allowing for lexicalized non‐initial word stress as a systematic option. In some cases, the stress patterns of loans can be accounted for by assuming pseudo‐morphology, by which polysyllabic loans are parsed into pseudo‐morphs imitating the pattern of native morphologically complex forms.
Keywords: word stress, loan words, phonology
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