2020.09.12 13:16
Jang, Hayeun. 2020. Palatals contribute to syllable weight:
Evidence from Spanish stress assignment. Studies in Phonetics, Phonology and
Morphology 26.2.
321-340.
This paper investigates the issue whether the stress system
of Spanish is weight-sensitive by examining the distinctive stress patterns of
trisyllabic words with palatal onsets in word-final syllables. Although
Spanish trisyllabic words with open penultimate and final syllables can have the
primary stress in any syllable, when an onset in a word-final syllable is a palatal
consonant, antepenultimate stress is not allowed and penultimate stress occurs.
By considering the complex articulatory patterns of palatals and the lengthening
of pre-palatal vowels in Spanish, I propose that a palatal onset in the final
syllable is attached to an independent moraic node of the penultimate syllable
and a syllabic node of the final syllable at the same time. In the framework of
Articulatory Phonology, I present how palatal onsets in a word-final syllable
can be doubly-linked to two syllables by proposing that a tongue body gesture
for palatals forms two types of gestural organizations with adjacent vocalic
gestures. The coarticulatory aggressiveness of the tongue body gesture for
palatals can account for the lengthening of the overlapping vocalic gesture.
Considering the proposed syllabic and gestural structures and final lengthening
in Spanish, this paper concludes that Spanish stress assignment is
weight-sensitive.
Keywords: stress
assignment, Spanish, palatal consonant, gestural organization