Stress in morphologically simple and complex Spanish words

Resumen

This chapter describes the most common patterns of stress in simple, derived and compound forms in Spanish. It discusses the specific prosodic structure of different word types and explores the role played by phonological and morphological factors in stress assignment. The chapter highlights the main ingredients of various traditional and more recent Optimality Theory analyses of Spanish stress. It then describes the regular and irregular stress patterns in simple nouns, adjectives and adverbs. The chapter also discusses the stress in the verbal domain. It focuses on the prosodic structure of compounds and adverbs ending in -mente, which were originally compounds in Latin. One can distinguish two main groups of analyses of Spanish stress depending on what they consider the domain of stress in nouns, adjectives and adverbs. In contrast to word-based analyses, a large number of studies assume that Spanish non-verbal stress is assigned to the stem, not the word.