What can stress placement tell us about (in)stability in language contact?

This study focuses on contact-induced stress shifts and syllabic prominence in Bulgarian Judeo-Spanish (BJS), a severely endangered Romance diaspora variety that has been in intense interaction with the dominant surrounding language Bulgarian for many centuries. Using data from a scripted dialogue play, it investigates two groups of informants from Bulgaria (bilingual speakers of Bulgarian (BG) and BJS), and monolingual speakers of BG, as well as a control group of monolingual speakers of different varieties of Mainstream Spanish. The structures under investigation are comparative and elative structures, consisting of particles or adverbs and following adjectives, as well as preverbal negation-clitic sequences. It is shown that that BJS patterns with (monolingual and bilingual) BG in realizing main stress on the comparative particle or the intensifier instead of the adjective but does not move stress from the negation particle to the following object clitics as is obligatory in BG. This suggests that core-grammatical structures like negation-clitic sequences that merely spell out formal features are more stable and less susceptible to contact-driven prosodic change as compared to constructions that also involve an information-structural component such as comparative and elative constructions.