Stress in Spanish

Stress in Spanish is functional: to change the placement of stress changes the meaning of a sentence or phrase: for example, célebre ('famous'), celebre ('[that] he/she celebrates'), and celebré ('I celebrated') contrast only by stress. There is some minor variance among Spanish dialects; a speaker of Rioplatense Spanish will pronounce boina ('beret') as [ˈbojna], but a speaker of Colombian Spanish will pronounce it as [boˈina] and spell it as boína.^[1]

Transcription

Spanish has only two degrees of stress. In traditional transcription, primary stress is marked with an acute accent (´) over the vowel. "Combining breve below" marks may be used to emphasize the "liaison" of syllables in Spanish vocal music. Unstressed parts of a word are left unmarked.

Position

The primary stress of a Spanish word usually occurs in one of three positions: on the final syllable (oxytone, e.g. señor, ciudad), on the penultimate syllable (paroxytone, e.g. señora, nosotros), or on the antepenultimate syllable (proparoxytone, e.g. teléfono, sábado), but in very rare cases, it can come on the fourth- or even fifth-last syllable in compound words (see below). Vowel-final words and those ending in -s or -n are usually stressed on the penultimate syllable.^[2] That accounts for around 80% of Spanish vocabulary.^[3]

There are almost no Spanish words with antepenultimate stress that have a complex syllable rime in the penult. For example, made-up words such as teléfosno, teléfiono and átasca are considered ill-formed by native speakers. There are a few exceptions, such as the anglicisms Wáshington and Mánchester, and the town of Frómista in Spain.

The trilled /r/, the palatal nasal /ɲ/, and the palatal lateral /ʎ/ are similarly excluded from the final syllable of proparoxytones. Thus chinchorro 'trawling net' is allowed, but the made-up chínchorro can be considered ungrammatical. That said, Spanish does have some words containing antepenultimate stress and trills in the final syllable onset, which are typically of onomatopoeic, Basque, or unknown origin: cháncharras-máncharras 'pretexts' (onomatopoeic), Chávarri (a last name of Basque origin), tábarro 'type of wasp'.^[4][5]

In addition, words that end in a falling diphthong almost always have final stress: carey 'tortoise' is allowed but made-up cárey isn't.^[6][7] Some loanwords make an exception: póney, yérsey, yóquey.

In addition, some of Chilean Spanish's voseo verb forms end in falling diphthongs but are stressed on the penultimate syllable. For example, bailábai 'you were dancing' ends on an unstressed falling diphthong.^[8][9]

Creating contrasts

All Spanish words have at least one stressed syllable when the words are used in isolation. The word para [ˈpaɾa] can be a verb (the singular pronoun form of "stop") or a preposition (in order to, for). When words are used in a phrase, the stress may be dropped depending on the part of speech. Para el coche can mean "stop the car" if the stress remains. If the stress is removed, it means "for the car". Some pairs of stressed and unstressed words are distinguished in writing by using a differential accent: sí 'yes' (stressed) — si 'if' (unstressed if used in a phrase).

In English, contrasts are made by reducing vowels, changing the loudness of the word, or changing the intonation of the phrase. For example, this is her car (listen^ⓘ) emphasizes the owner of the car. If the stress is changed to say this is her car (listen^ⓘ), the emphasis is on showing what object belongs to a specific person. In Spanish, stress is almost always changed by reordering the words. Using the same example, este coche es suyo emphasises the owner, and éste es su coche emphasises the object.

Word stress categories

All Spanish words can be classified into one of four groups based on the position of their stress. If the last syllable is stressed it falls into the aguda category. Aguda words generally end in a consonant other than n or s or are a conjugated verb that ends in an accented, stressed vowel. If the stress falls on the second-last syllable, it is classified as a llana or grave. Llanas typically are words that end in n, s, or a vowel. Any exceptions have a written accent. Words with the stress placed on the third-last are categorized as esdrújulas, and those with stress on the fourth- or fifth-last syllable are called sobresdrújulas. In either of the last two categories, the stressed syllable must be accented to break the rules of the first two categories. A "singular" Spanish word is never a sobresdrújula; this kind of stress occurs only in verbs with more than one pronominal suffix, such as diciéndonosla (diciendo + nos + la; "telling it to us") or llévesemelo (lleve + se + me + lo; "take it with you for me").

While certain adverbs ending in -mente have accent marks before the third syllable, they are not considered sobresdrújula. Instead, adverbs in -mente are considered to have two stressed syllables, one in -mente and the other in the adjectival root. For example, lentamente 'slowly' is pronounced [ˈlentaˈmente].^[10][11]

References

1. Diccionario panhispánico de dudas. RAE, 2023.
2. Eddington, David (2004). Spanish Phonology and Morphology: Experimental and Quantitative. p. 120. ISBN 9789027215628. ...vowel-final words and those ending in -s are stressed on the penultimate syllable, one would expect the test words to be given penultimate stress... One evidence that quantity sensitivity is relevant in Spanish is cited by Harris (1983, 1992)
3. Joshi, R. Malatesha; Aaron, P. G. (2006). Handbook of Orthography and Literacy. p. 157. ISBN 9781136610813. The normative pattern of accentuation in Spanish is, according to Quilis (1981, pp. 333–336), with the stress on the penultimate syllable. Of words, 79.5% are paroxytone: these words are stressed on the next-to-the-last syllable
4. Lipski, John M. (1989). "Spanish Yeísmo and the Palatal Resonants: Towards a Unified Analysis" (PDF). Probus. 1 (2). doi:10.1515/prbs.1989.1.2.211.
5. Hualde, José Ignacio (2005). "Quasi-phonemic contrasts in Spanish". WCCFL 23: Proceedings of the 23rd West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press. pp. 374–398.
6. Lipski, John M. (1990). "SPANISH TAPS AND TRILLS: PHONOLOGICAL STRUCTURE OF AN ISOLATED OPPOSITION" (PDF). Folia Linguistica. 24 (3–4): 153–172. doi:10.1515/flin.1990.24.3-4.153.
7. Lipski, John M. (1997). "Spanish word stress: the interaction of moras and minimality" (PDF). In Martinez-Gil, Fernando; Morales-Front, Alfonso (eds.). Issues in the phonology and morphology of the major Iberian languages. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press. pp. 559–593. ISBN 9780878406470.
8. Baquero Velásquez, Julia M.; Westphal Montt, Germán F. (16 July 2014). "Un análisis sincrónico del voseo verbal chileno y rioplatense". Forma y Función (in Spanish). 27 (2): 11–40. doi:10.15446/fyf.v27n2.47558.
9. Real Academia Española. "voseo | Diccionario panhispánico de dudas". «Diccionario panhispánico de dudas» (in Spanish). Retrieved 2022-04-28.
10. "tilde". Diccionario panhispánico de dudas (in Spanish). Royal Spanish Academy. Retrieved 20 May 2022.
11. "acento". Diccionario panhispánico de dudas (in Spanish). Royal Spanish Academy. Retrieved 20 May 2022.

• Dalbor, John B. (1997). Spanish Pronunciation: Theory and Practice (Print ed.). Fort Worth, TX: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. ISBN 9780030180774.

External links

• Erichson, Gerald (2012). "Stress and Accent Marks". About.com: Spanish Language. About.com.