The intricate connection between diphthongs and stress in Spanish

Abstract

This article investigates the interaction of gliding and default stress in Spanish and provides a unified constraint-based analysis of the two phenomena. It is argued that a better understanding of the representations/constraints responsible for the default patterns of gliding and stress in Spanish is achieved when syllabic and metrical structure are treated as interdependent. The originality of the proposal lies in the idea that, contrary to most common patterns of extrametricality at the edges of words, word final consonants and word final offglides are claimed to be the only moraic codas in the language. Within the present analysis, default patterns of gliding and stress are accomplished via the interaction of well-established markedness constraints, whereas exceptions to default (i.e. marked stress and the so-called exceptional hiatus) are all explained by the same mechanism, i.e. lexical prosodic specifications to which output must be faithful.