An Experimental Investigation of Stress in Greek Acronyms

Journal of Greek Linguistics 15 (2015) 187–234 brill.com/jgl Stress in the Absence of Morphological Conditioning: An Experimental Investigation of Stress in Greek Acronyms Anthi Revithiadou* Aristotle University of Thessaloniki [email protected] Kalomoira Nikolou University of the Aegean [email protected] Despina Papadopoulou Aristotle University of Thessaloniki [email protected] Abstract Greek is a morphology-dependent stress system, where stress is lexically specified for a number of individual morphemes (e.g., roots and suffixes). In the absence of lexically encoded stress, a default stress emerges. Most theoretical analyses of Greek stress that assume antepenultimate stress to represent the default (e.g., Malikouti-Drachman & Drachman 1989; Ralli & Touratzidis 1992; Revithiadou 1999) are not independently confirmed by experimental studies (e.g., Protopapas et al. 2006; Apostolouda 2012; Topintzi & Kainada 2012; Revithiadou & Lengeris in press). Here, we explore the nature of the default stress in Greek with regard to acronyms, given their lack of overt morphol- * We wish to thank the two anonymous reviewers who provided useful feedback and the audience of the icgl10 (10th International Conference on Greek Linguistics, 2011) for their comments and suggestions, which greatly improved this article. We owe special thanks to Ed Joycey for proof reading the article and to Alexandros Tantos for helping us with the research on the hnc/ilsp corpus (http://hnc.ilsp.gr/en/default.asp). Kalomoira Nikolou would also like to thank the State Scholarship Foundation of the Hellenic Republic for the financial support of her postdoctoral research. The usual disclaimers apply. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi: 10.1163/15699846-01502003 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 01:38:25AM via free access 188 revithiadou, nikolou and papadopoulou ogy and fixed stress pattern, with a goal of exploring how stress patterns are shaped when morphological information (encapsulated in the inflectional ending) is sup- pressed. For this purpose, we conducted two production (reading aloud) experiments, which revealed, for our consultants, first, an almost complete lack of antepenultimate stress and, second, a split between penultimate and final stress dependent on acronym length, the type of the final segment and the syllable type of the penultimate syllable. We found two predominant correspondences: (a) consonant-final acronyms and end stress and (b) vowel-final acronyms and the inflected word the vowel represents, the effect being that stress patterns for acronyms are linked to the inflected words they represent only if enough morphonological information about the acronym’s segments is available to create familiarity effects. Otherwise, we find a tendency for speakers to prefer stress at stem edges. Keywords acronyms – Greek stress – default stress – indeclinable words – familiarity – reading aloud experiment 1 Lexically Assigned and Default Stress in Greek Stress is not always calculated by means of a phonological rule which oper- ates on the basis of syllable count or weight sensitivity. In lexical stress systems, for instance, stress relies on pre-assigned information that morphemes may be endowed with.1 Morpheme concatenation may yield, therefore, input strings with conflicting stress properties. The actual position of primary stress is even- tually determined by a grammar-specific principle (e.g., edgemostness, head- edness, etc.). The examples in (1) and (2) from Russian and Greek, respectively, are instructive. In (1b), for example, the inflectional ending /-á/ has a lexically pre-assigned stress pronounced on the surface, unless the root itself is stressed, as in the case of /bolót-/ in (1d); in this case the stress of the inflectional suffix loses to the stress of the root. The same applies to the gen.pl suffix /-ón/ in the Greek examples (2b) and (2d), respectively. 1 On this, see Bat-El (1989, 1993); van der Hulst (1999); Idsardi (1992); Halle & Idsardi (1995); for a morphology-phonology interface account of lexical stress, see Alderete (1999, 2001a, 2001b) and Revithiadou (1999, 2007). Journal of Greek Linguistics 15 (2015) 187–234 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 01:38:25AM via free access stress in the absence of morphological conditioning 189 (1) Russian: Inflected neuter nouns in -o (nom.sg), -a (nom.pl)2 a. óblako /oblak-o/ ‘cloud’ b. oblaká /oblak-á/ c. bolóto /bolót-o/ ‘swamp’ d. bolóta /bolót-á/ (2) Greek: Inflected feminine nouns in -a (nom.sg), -on (gen.pl) a. mélisa /melis-a/ ‘bee’ b. melisón /melis-ón/ c. selíða /selíð-a/ ‘page’ d. selíðon /selíð-ón/ Importantly, the language-specific elsewhere or default stress pattern arises when no input stress is present. The default stress is initial in Russian (1a) and antepenultimate in Greek (2a). However, the question of which pattern represents the default is far from trivial and is one which has instigated lengthy discussions in the literature. For instance, both initial stress (Halle 1973, 1997; Kiparsky & Halle 1977; Melvold 1990, among others), and post-stem stress (Alderete 1999, 2001a, 2001b) have been proposed to represent the default in theoretical analyses of Russian accentuation. On the other hand, a series of nonce-probe experiments (Nikolaeva 1971; Crosswhite, Alderete, Beasley & Markman 2003) revealed that Russian speakers’ productions favored stem-final stress, however, in sharp contrast with the findings of recent experimental studies (Andreev 2004; Fainleib 2008; Lavitskaya & Kabak 2011a, 2011b, 2014) according to which penultimate stress is the default. Similarly in Greek, theoretical analyses assume antepenultimate3 stress to be the phonological default (Malikouti-Drachman & Drachman 1989; Ralli & Touratzidis 1992; Revithiadou 1999, 2007; Burzio & Tantalou 2007, among others), whereas experimental studies on stress assignment in pseudowords indi- cate penultimate stress as the speakers’ preferred output pattern at least in cer- tain classes of nouns (Protopapas et al. 2006; Apostolouda 2012; Revithiadou et al. 2012, 2013; Revithiadou & Lengeris in press). It is evident, therefore, that there is more to be discovered about the phonological aspect of lexical stress systems. A great deal of confusion in the literature results from the fact that the pattern that represents the non-lexically inflicted stress represents the predictable 2 The following abbreviations are used in the text: apu: antepenultimate (stress), c: consonant, fem: feminine, fn: footnote, gen: genitive, masc: masculine, nom: nominative, pu: penultimate (stress), pl: plural, sd: Standard Deviation, sg: singular, u: ultimate (stress), voc: vocative, v: vowel. 3 But see Apoussidou (2011) who claims that the default in Greek is final. Journal of Greek Linguistics 15 (2015) 187–234 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 01:38:25AM via free access 190 revithiadou, nikolou and papadopoulou aspect of the stress system, commonly known as the phonological default, and the pattern that arises as the most preferred or frequent stress choice in the speakers’ productions, dubbed here the dynamic default, are often seen as two sides of the same coin. In this article, we take a different stance and claim that they do not necessarily coincide. We explore this question in a group of uninflected words, namely acronyms. These constructions are chosen because they allow us to examine how stress is assigned when: (a) morphology is at its weakest, i.e., when information on the position of stress carried out by inflectional markers is not available to the speaker, and (b) whatever is left, i.e., the stem, has an unspecified stress pattern. For this purpose, we designed and conducted two production experiments using acronyms as experimental stimuli. Acronym constructions are created by extracting parts from the beginning of words that belong to the same phrase. With the exception of very frequent and hence familiar acronyms (e.g., [ðeí] /ðimósia epixírisi ilektrismú/ ‘Public Power Corporation’, [oté] /orɣanismós tilepikinonión eláðos/ ‘Hellenic Telecommunications Organization’, etc.), which have an established stress pattern, acronyms are indeclinable words with non-fixed stress. Hence, they constitute an ideal case study for investigating how stress surfaces in suffixless words with no inherent information on the position of stress. The main question that we advance and aim at answering here is whether the Greek speakers will engage the phonological default or a special, stress- encoding mechanism when confronted with decisions on stress, especially when the lexical items in question are of low frequency or novel words. Since as infants, speakers of systems with rich stress contrasts are forced to build more elaborate representations of stress in their Mental Lexicon, they are expected to rely on these representations when assigning stress (see the Stress Deafness Hypothesis, Peperkamp & Dupoux 2002; Dupoux & Peperkamp 2002; Peperkamp 2004, et seq., proposed for l2 acquisition). Second, we also explore which stress pattern represents the dynamic default, that is, the speakers’ most favored stress choice. 2 Acronym Words Acronymic constructions are very productive and common in everyday use. In contrast to the vast majority of Greek vocabulary, acronyms lack overt inflec- tion4 and have flexible, often indeterminate, stress. The latter characteristic dis- 4 Only highly frequent ones, felt as common words, e.g., δ.ε.η. [ðeí] and ο.τ.ε. [oté] noted above, Journal of Greek Linguistics 15 (2015) 187–234

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