Patterns of Spanish stress in verbs and non-verbs

What is it about?

In this paper, I develop an algorithm that explains the patterns of where stress appears in Spanish. The same algorithm works for both verbs and non-verbs. One difficulty with developing such an algorithm for Spanish is accounting for lexical accent, cases where the position of stress follows a different pattern for different words. I argue that the same algorithm is used for all words, but that the position where they start counting syllables is different.

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Why is it important?

Previous analyses of Spanish stress used different algorithms for the verbs and the non-verbs, whereas this analysis uses the same algorithm for both. Additionally, the algorithm uses a minimal amount of the internal structure of the word in order to determine where to start counting syllables. Thus, this analysis is compatible with a view of grammar where the different parts of grammar operate separately (modularity).