Beste azentu bat Bizkaikoa: Getxo (azentudun hitzak)

Abstract

Several works have described the prosodic system of Getxo Basque and Northwestern Basque in general: its pitch-accent nature, the occurrence of accent by the action of accenting morphological operations (compounding, derivation, inflection) and of phrase-level accent assignment rules, and the existence of lexically accented and unaccented morphemes. This paper focuses on the case of accented words whose accent does not derive from the morphological operations mentioned above, and intends to modestly contribute to the field by exemplifying and classifying the different sources of this lexical accent in Getxo Basque. These sources are, namely, the inheritance of accent from borrowed words and the existence of non-complex native accented words of unknown derivation. The compilation is completed by suggesting the possibility that the first-syllable accent found in a number of words might be motivated by the words’ expressive value, and therefore not be a case of lexical accent but an accent assigned by a phrase or sentence level rule of syntactic or intonational nature.