SRPP: Stress in Modern Breton: theoretical, experimental, and historical perspectives

In this talk I explore Breton stress from three perspectives: theoretical, experimental and historical. I start with a theoretical analysis of stress patterns across speakers from different linguistic backgrounds, encompassing both so-called ‘traditional’ and ‘new’ speakers, and challenging the notion that ‘new’ speakers use a French stress pattern when speaking Breton. I then use experimental methods to explore the concept of ‘stress deafness’, a term which was first applied to French, and consider whether speakers of Breton, a minority language, perceive and store stress patterns with greater ease than monolingual speakers. Finally, I examine a phenomenon which seems to have undergone change in the recent history of Breton, namely the placement of stress on proclitics.