The Prosody-Morphology Interface in German and Italian from a Contrastive Perspective

Abstract

In this study, the interplay and the mutual influences between the prosodic and the morphological levels in German and in Italian are discussed. In German, phenomena like final-obstruent devoicing, insertion of linking elements, reduced syllables, lexical stress placement, nicknames, abbreviation and reduplication processes are taken into consideration. The Italian processes of shortenings, hypocoristics, word truncation, syntactic doubling, /s/-voicing and the insertion of epenthetic vowels are considered relevant for the prosody-morphology interface. Crosslinguistic similarities and differences are discussed and used to formulate hypotheses about the main difficulties encountered by German native speakers learning Italian and possible peculiar transfer processes. The main aim is to discuss the extent to which transfer phenomena based on prosodic and morphological constraints of German L1 can shape prosodic and morphological production in the acquisition phase of Italian as a second language.