| ROA: | 427 |
|---|---|
| Title: | Vowel Weightlessness and Stress Retraction in Spanish |
| Authors: | Carlos-Eduardo Pineros |
| Comment: | |
| Length: | 32 |
| Abstract: | Vowel Weightlessness and Stress Retraction in Spanish Carlos-Eduardo Piñeros University of Iowa This paper deals with the two most productive patterns of Spanish primary stress: unmarked stress, which consists of projecting a word- final trochee, (e.g. [pe.(pí.no) 'cucumber'), and retracted stress, which assigns stress to the syllable immediately before the one that would be the stress bearer if the unmarked word-final trochee were to be projected (e.g. [es.tí.mu.lo] 'stimulus'). Focusing on proparoxytone words, I present evidence that the foot they project is trisyllabic. Such foot is not in violation of the universal binarity condition imposed on metrical feet because it contains only two moras. What makes this possible is that the nucleus of the middle syllable of the trisyllabic foot is a weightless vowel (e.g. [i.(ló.xi.ko)], which is a marked feature that characterizes certain Spanish morphemes. Because Spanish learners are exposed to evidence that certain morphemes contain a metrically irrelevant vowel, they posit underlying forms that carry this information, which is then preserved in output forms to comply with faithfulness constraints. I demonstrate that the assignment of primary stress in Spanish is governed by three universal prosodic principles requiring prosodic heads to be final and feet to be left-headed and binary. Perfect satisfaction of these principles is only possible when the final syllable is heavy and the word does not contain a marked morpheme (e.g. [a.(mór)] 'love'). By contrast, if the word ends in a light syllable or if it contains a morpheme with a metrically anomalous vowel, stress needs to retract so that the prosodic constraints may be optimally satisfied and prosodic heads are free of epenthetic elements. This always happens at the cost of misaligning the main-stressed syllable but not the main-stressed foot, which explains why stress must fall on one of the last three syllables of the word. This proposal has the advantage that it accounts for stress retraction without having to resort to arbitrary re-ranking of the constraints, as all previous constraint-based analyses have been forced to do. KEYWORDS: Stress retraction, Syllable weight, Metrical structure, Proparoxytones |
| Type: | Paper/tech report |
| Area/Keywords: | |
| Article: | Version 1 |