Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Wandruszka, Ulrich

Titel

Zur Motivation des französischen Wortakzents

Ist Teil von

• Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie, 2020-03, Vol.136 (1), p.2-24

Ort / Verlag

Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton

Erscheinungsjahr

2020

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Studies of individual languages rarely discuss in any depth the question of how, or to what extent, the positioning of word stress in polysyllabic words is motivated functionally although addressing this issue would mean relating the structural levels of phonetics/phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics systematically to each other. Given that in French practically all (Latin) syllables following the syllable which carries the main stress have been muted, words and word forms are oxytones, generally carrying stress on the last syllable. As a result, endings and suffixes which constitute the morphological head of a word and are, as such, normally unstressed, now also carry stress. This can be seen in or , which in English would correspond to or * or in German to * or respectively. Since stress is normally positioned on the lexical stem, which carries more information, a morphoprosodic leading to a countericonic stress pattern obtains in French. Interestingly, this phenomenon has hardly attracted serious attention in linguistics so far, and speakers of French have apparently remained undisturbed by the . The same is true of the counter-intuitive stress placed on enclitic pronouns in or – – Apparently, language as an instrument also works when the encoding is suboptimal or dysfunctional. The reason for this must be that language is also supported by the (lexical) content of the signs, which nevertheless makes an appropriate interpretation possible.