A footless stroll through Italian stress

Despite the fact that Italian has been studied intensely for many years, the intricate relationship between its syllable structure and its metrical facts (weight and stress assignment) still poses a very significant formal challenge to previously published theoretical accounts. In this paper, we provide a novel account of Italian stress within the framework of Strict CV Metrics. We show that this approach most accurately captures the empirical data of the language, while providing a formally simple analysis which does not require feet, binary or ternary. The analysis is computationally simple and derives the 'three syllable' window effect without arbitrarily stipulating the foot-size of the language or overgenerating forms.