Extrametricality and stress in Spanish and Italian

Abstract

In Harris (1983) an analysis of Spanish stress is proposed in which the notion 'extrametricality' plays a crucial role. The constraints on extrametricality presented there differ from the ones proposed by Hayes (1981) in that they refer to a morphological domain instead of a stress domain. This implies that in Harris' analysis the domain of the Peripherality Condition and stress no longer coincide, resulting in weakening of the theory of stress. In the present analysis of Spanish stress we take Harris' proposal as a starting point, but we show that Hayes' original interpretation of extrametricality must be maintained. To this end we introduce a type of rule as used by Archangeli (1984) for Yawelmani, which assigns extrametricality at the stress domain, triggered by a diacritic on stems. This rule enables us to express some generalizations about Spanish stress left unnoticed by Harris. In the last part of this article it is shown that the same principles for stress assignment which were formulated for Spanish can be extended to Italian with some language-specific modifications.