Antepenultimate stress in Spanish: In defense of syllable weight and grammatically-informed analogy
Martín Fuchs
July 2018 

Spanish has a contrastive stress system with three major possibilities: antepenultimate, penultimate, and final stress. While penultimate and final stress are to some extent predictable, a major point of contention in the literature is whether antepenultimate stress assignment is rule-governed (Harris 1983; Roca 1991; i.a.). By examining different analogical and grammatically-informed models and their predictive power in capturing experimental data, I show that a Maximum Entropy model (Hayes & Wilson 2008) that includes syllable weight in its lexical representations is the best predictor of antepenultimate stress assignment. In doing so, I also dispute the claim that the trill in Spanish is a geminate tap (Harris 1983), and provide support for its status as a singleton consonant.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/004120 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Glossa: a journal of general linguistics
keywords:	phonotactics, spanish stress, syllable weight, analogical models, maximum entropy models, phonology
Downloaded:	440 times

 

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