Verb-Clitic Structures in Eivissan Catalan: Recursive Prosodic Words and Allomorphy

Abstract

This paper deals with stress shift in verb-clitic structures in Eivissan Catalan, an understudied Romance variety. Within Balearic Catalan, this is the only subdialect in which stress shift is restricted to apply only in second conjugation pre-clitic infinitives, those that, as opposed to other conjugations, have penultimate stress when they are pronounced in isolation. Stress in second conjugation infinitives in Eivissan Catalan shifts one syllable to the right, that is, to the final syllable of the verbal stem, when one or more pronominal enclitics follow. There is no stress shift in pre-clitic imperatives. We claim that pronominal enclitics in Eivissan Catalan adjoin to a recursive, maximal prosodic word, and that the domain for stress assignment is the minimal, embedded prosodic word. We further analyze two cases of stress-conditioned allomorphy (i.e. allomorphy of the infinitive morph and allomorphy of the verbal root) that occur in infinitive-clitic structures.

Keywords

• allomorphy
• clitic
• Eivissan Catalan
• prosodic word
• recursivity
• stress shift