The emergence of postcyclic prosody in loanword integration: toneless latinate adjectives in Serbo-Croatian

Abstract: A case of exceptional assignment of prosody to loanwords is considered. In Serbo-Croatian, where in loanwords the original position of stress is generally preserved in some way, a small class of Latinate adjectives (e.g., Elementaarna ‘elementary’ and pErsonaalna ‘personal’) become toneless e.g. they display the postcyclic initial falling accent. An account of these data is proposed which combines a new approach to postcyclic prosody, which is shown to go hand in hand with syntactically opaque structures, and a new model of loanword integration, which views the loanword trajectory as lexicalisation. As a result, an enriched theory of both domains and their interaction arises to account for the data and shed some additional light on the position of loanwords in the architecture of the grammar/lexicon. Keywords: loanword integration, postcyclic prosody, prosody/syntax interface, morphology, lexicon