Sobre el acento roncalés

Abstract

The now extinct Roncalese dialect is know to have possessed phonologically contrastive stress, like Souletin, its northern cousin, and unlike Basque dialects further to the west. In this paper the Roncalese accentual system is studied in some detail, expanding on Michelena's work on this topic. Similarities and differences with Souletin are discussed. As sources of data, besides Michelena's papers, published field work with the last speakers of this dialect, principally by K. Izagirre an K. Artola, have been consulted. An important additional source is a recording made in 1958 by Allières and Michelena, which, to our knowledge, had hitherto remained unpublished. It is shown that in morphologically simple nominals and forms bearing unaccented suffixes, the stress must fall on one of the last three syllables of the stem and that syllable quantity plays an important role in constraining this "stress window". There is a set of accented or stress-attracting derivational and inflectional suffixes, which are essentially the same suffixes as in Souletin. Also as in Souletin the stress is attracted to the syllable resulting from vowel contractions involving stem-final -a. I argue that the apparent preference for word-initial stress which has been noticed by authors such as Martinet is an illusion. The stress pattern of compound, secondary stress and the interaction between stress and segmental rules affecting the number ofsyllables are also given some consideration.