Consonant gemination and stress patterns

Question

Is there a strong correlation between geminate consonants and initial-syllable stress, or stress in the earlier syllables of words?

A survey of European languages suggests that there might be such a correlation. For example, in Italian, where antepenultimate stress is common, geminate consonants are ubiquitous (fatto "done", troppo "too much", etc.). By contrast, geminates seem rare-to-absent in standard Spanish/Portuguese (which have more thoroughgoing penultimate/final stress) and French (which has mainly final stress).

Similarly, most Germanic languages had geminates at some point in their history (although many are no longer true phonetic geminates due to sound change), and initial-syllable stress was historically the norm in Germanic. Cf. English tap < Old Eng. tæppa, Icelandic tappi "cork, peg", German Zapfen "peg, pin", etc.

Thanks for any further insight into this issue.

Answer 1

Let us stick with Italian and Spanish. Both of these have retained (broadly speaking) the position of the Latin accent. Italian has also retained Latin geminate consonants, as well as creating new geminates through the simplification of clusters (type: factum > fatto). Spanish, on the other hand, has lost all Latin geminates except for -rr-. So the two languages agree (mainly) with regards to the accent, but diverge with regards to geminates. This speaks loudly against the notion of a correlation between accent and gemination.

Answer 2

There is a well-known indirect correlation between stress and gemination, because (1) heavy syllables tend to attract stress and (2) geminate consonants tend to make syllables heavy. The former correlation is frequently referred to as the Weight-to-Stress principle. The correlation between stress and syllable weight is so strong that it is used presumptively to establish the subtypology of syllable weight, where long vowels always make a syllable heavy, and coda consonants may. In moraic theory, it is generally held that autonomous coda consonants (part of a two-consonant cluster) may have an additional mora (long vowels always do), but the first half of a geminate always does. The pattern where geminates attract stress, while other CC clusters do not, turns out to be rather rare, appearing in Cahuilla, San`ani Yemeni Arabic, some dialects of Hindi and Pattani Malay (the latter, though, is quite bizarre since usually onset geminates do not cause syllables to behave as though they are heavy). Post-hoc analysis of the possibilities for stress and syllable weight correlation, in light of these factors that influence stress, actually reveals that geminate consonants tend to be treated exactly the same as autonomous CC clusters, so that geminates are not usually special, although there are a few languages where they are.