Stress Patterns with Clitics and Weak Pronominals in Post-Verbal Position in Romance Languages

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This project investigates the interaction of stress (accent) and syntax in a group of closely related Romance languages, including Aragonese, Gascon, Majorcan and Menorcan Catalan, Sardinian, and several Southern and Northern Italian varieties. Data on the stress and word-order patterns of sentences involving pronominal clitics associated with the verb will be gathered from existing published descriptions, and from fieldwork in which consultants will be asked for translations from the most closely related majority (standard) language that they also speak (Spanish, Catalan, French or Italian). A database of the stress and word-order patterns will be constructed from the digital audio recordings of these fieldwork sessions. The study of the stress patterns on the pronominal clitics in these languages is particularly significant because the clitics in the standard Romance languages (e.g. the "les" [them] in French "Je les vois" [I see them]) are unstressed. In addition, the study of these phenomena will further illuminate the principles of interaction between phonology, morphology and syntax, a particularly difficult area of theoretical linguistic study. Finally, the database and recordings that this research will produce will be publicly-accessible repositories of information about a wide range of lesser-known Romance languages, many of which are in danger of disappearing by the end of this century.