Syllabic stress within Latin words: fixed or variable?

[Michael Zwingli]

I think that I know the basic rules for syllabic stress in Latin words: stress the penult if the syllable is long via a long vowel, a diphthong, or certain consonants following the vowel; stress the antepenult if the penult is short; etc. However, is the stressed syllable within any given Latin word fixed, or is it effected by considerations of the Latin sentence; can the stress within a word shift as a result of the influence of the phonetics, syllabic stress, or vowel length within adjacent words in a sentence? I don't have a specific example in mind right now, but this question occurred to me recently, and I wanted to bounce it off you folks here. Thanks much.

 

[Pacifica]

It's mostly fixed, but:

- prepositions are, prosodically, clitics, so a preposition and the following word usually work as one word for accent purposes, so that for instance, in via = IN-vi-a.

- I read something along the lines that some set phrases may have been treated prosodically as one word, too.

 

[Michael Zwingli]

Thank you, Pax. I'll try to keep those exceptions in mind when reading/reciting Latin text to myself.

 

[Pacifica]

You're welcome. Naturally, words that are visibly clitics (mostly enclitics then, like -que) form one prosodic word with the word they are attached to, as well (e.g. virum = VI-rum but virumque = vi-RUM-que). Maybe you already knew this, or deduced it from my last post, but I thought I should mention it in case it wasn't so.