Bitonal pitch accent and phonological alignment in

This study presents new data on pitch accent (PA) alignment in Sardinian, a Romance language spoken in Italy. We propose that what has been described as “stress shift” involved in encliticization processes is not a change in the word level stress, but a change in the association of the pitch accent. Our claim is that word level stress remains in situ, and the falling tune which our data exhibit can be interpreted as a bitonal pitch accent (H+L*) associated with the entire verb + enclitic unit: the starred tone is associated with the rightmost metrically prominent syllable, and the leading tone is associated with the word-level stressed syllable. The theoretical questions we address are twofold: (i) how are the landing sites of the two tonal targets phonetically identified; (ii) how are the phonetic facts reconciled with prosodic structure.