From Lexical Accent System to Default Stress: Questions of Learnability in Diachrony Ryan Sandell Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München ryan.sandell@lrz.uni-muenchen.de Contents 1 A Simple Hard Problem 2 2 Stress Assignment in Proto-Germanic and Proto-Indo-European 2 2.1 Stress Assignment in Late Proto-Germanic .............................. 3 2.2 Stress Assignment in Proto-Indo-European .............................. 6 2.3 From PIE to Late Proto-Germanic Prosody: What Differs? ...................... 9 3 Perspectives on the “Proto-Germanic Stress Shift” 12 4 Metrical Stress and Lexical Accent Systems: Learnability, Acquisition, and Psycholinguistics 15 4.1 Lexical Stress and Phonotactic Learning ............................... 16 4.2 Lexical Stress in L1 Acquisition .................................... 18 4.3 “Stress Deafness” and the Psycholinguistics of Stress Perception ................... 20 4.4 Bias in Stress Systems and Stress Acquistion ............................. 22 4.5 Is Learning Really Veridical? The Role of NonFinality ....................... 23 4.6 Summary ................................................ 24 5 The Development of Proto-Germanic Prosody: Data and Simulations of Phonotactic Learning 24 5.1 Frequency Distributions of Stress and Prosodic Shape ........................ 25 5.1.1 Stress Distributions in the Rigveda .............................. 25 5.1.2 Stress Distributions and Syllable Weight in the Rigveda ................... 26 5.1.3 Stressed and Unstressed Allomorphs in Inflectional Morphology .............. 28 5.1.4 Prosodic Shapes in the Germanic Lexicon .......................... 29 5.2 The Role of Frequency Distributions Alone .............................. 30 5.3 Phonological Biases: Trochee, NonFinality, and Weight-to-Stress ............... 33 5.4 Grammars Collide: Lexical Accent vs. Left-edge Stress ........................ 34 5.5 Summary ................................................ 35 1