lexical stress in alphabetisms

[Martin Haspelmath]

Dear all,
> I'm interested in patterns of lexical stress in a specific type of 
> acronym -- let's call them letter-by-letter acronyms -- whose 
> pronunciation consists of each letter bearing its own individual name, 
> eg. English US [yu:es], LFG [elefji:], etc.  (Not all languages have 
> letter-by-letter acronyms, for example Hebrew does not.)
>
> In two languages that I'm familiar with, English and Papuan Malay, 
> word stress is commonly or predominantly penultimate; however, 
> letter-by-letter acronyms invariably place the stress on the last 
> syllable, eg. [yu:ES], [elefJI:].  Is this a coincidence, or is there 
> a general principle at play here?  (One might perhaps wish to argue 
> that the final stress is phrasal rather than lexical, but in other 
> respects these acronyms behave like single words.)
This is a very interesting observation that had never occurred to me. In 
two other languages that I'm familiar with, German and Russian, the same 
holds true: Lexical stress in alphabetisms is always on the last 
syllable, although other words may have stress elsewhere (and prefer to 
have stress elsewhere, especially in German). I disagree with Wolfgang 
Schulze's claim that stress may also be initial in German. I cannot say 
'FDP (Freie Demokratische Partei), except contrastively (e.g. die 'SPD 
und die 'FDP). (But it is true that the exact conditions for contrastive 
use are unclear. These two abbreviations also contrast with respect to 
their last letter, though less saliently. And one can also say, in 
coordination,  'CDU und 'CSU, although these two do not contrast in 
theeir first letter at all.)

My guess would be that this stress pattern represents a borrowing from 
French, which was a dominant language when this kind of abbreviation 
became widespread.

Incidentally, the term "alphabetism" is relatively well-established for 
what David has in mind, and there is no need for the ad-hoc term 
"letter-by-letter acronym" (see 
http://urts120.uni-trier.de/glottopedia/index.php/Alphabetism).

Martin

P.S. On the topic of "pseudo-partitive" (a cup of tea) and "true 
partitive" (a cup of the tea): Doesn't someone have a better pair of 
terms for these? "Pseudo-partitives" are of course much more common, so 
it's really strange to have only a "pseudo-" term for them.

-- 
Martin Haspelmath (haspelmath at eva.mpg.de)
Max-Planck-Institut fuer evolutionaere Anthropologie, Deutscher Platz 6	
D-04103 Leipzig      
Tel. (MPI) +49-341-3550 307, (priv.) +49-341-980 1616

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