Stress Assignment in Italian Loanwords in English and its Impact on the Stressing of Foreign Words by Native English Speakers

Abstract

Italian loanwords in English are stressed according to their original Italian stress patterns in structures. The lack of autonomy of the English stress system, which is only rendered by few stress variants, demonstrates that English faithfully reproduces the phonological properties of Italian stress. When dictionary-based data is compared with oral data, collected by means of tests carried out on native English speakers, the results show that English speakers are sensitive to Italian stress assignment. Indeed, stress match increases with the speakers’ exposure to Italian. The introduction of Italian loanwords might have created a sub-system in English with a specific stress pattern that might apply to foreign words with structures.

Keywords

• lexical stress
• Italian loanwords
• Loan Phonology
• English pronunciation dictionaries
• English native speakers’ perception.