While interaction of primary stress with morphological structure has been widely studied within prosodic morphology (McCarthy &Prince 1986/96 et seq.) less attention has been paid to this type of interface phenomenon related to secondary stress. With respect to Italian or German, the reason for this minor interest in prosodic constraints activated by secondary stress is presumably due to the fact that there are no explicit phonetic correlates for secondary stress, cf. e.g. for German KNAUS, WIESE & DOMAHS 2011, KLEBER & KLIPPHAHN 2006, JESSEN 1993, for Italian ALBER 2008, SCALISE&VOGEL 1982, BERTINETTO 1976. Regarding German (the language under investigation in the following), some researches even question the existence of secondary stress (compare e.g. WIESE (2000: 275), for post-tonic positions, or MOULTON 1962, for loanwords. But although phonetic evidence for secondary stress is scarce and contradictory, there seem to be morphological and phonological phenomena tied to secondary stress. For instance HALL 1998 presents two allomorphy rules in which reference to secondary stress is needed, ALBER (2008: 44f.) points to speaker intuitions and phonological rules like glottal stop insertion before a hypothetical secondary stress, ccompare e.g. Chá[ʔ]òs or Mícha[ʔ]èl (at least for some speakers).
In this contribution, it is argued that there is a very strong tendency in German to realize rhythmic secondary stress (RSS) - which is distinguished from morphologically motivated secondary stress due to prosodic compounding - at the left edge of prosodic words (PW).
