Unstressed words in Spanish  

Oleh:

Hualde, Jose Ignacio

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Language Sciences (Full Text) vol. 31 no. 2-3 (2009), page 199-212.
Topik: Accent; Prosodic domains; Spanish phonology; Stress; Unstressed words
Fulltext: vol. 31 issue 2-3 March - May, 2009. p. 199-212.pdf (722.45KB)

Isi artikel

In this paper, I examine the prosodic nature of unstressed function words in Spanish. I defend the hypothesis that these words, like all other words in the language, have a syllable that is lexically designated as stressed. I suggest that the essential property of these words is that they are subject to a rule of prosodic merger with following elements within the syntactic phrase, creating a single prosodic word domain. Their surface stresslessnes, I argue, is a consequence of the fact that, by a general rule operating in the language, only the rightmost lexical stress is preserved within a prosodic word domain in Spanish. I also consider several pragmatic contexts in which these words may receive stress in discourse. Finally, I briefly compare stresslessness in Spanish with accentlessness in Basque and tonelessness in Bantu languages.

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