Los acentos contiguos en español

Abstract

This paper, extracted from a doctoral dissertation about rhythm in language, examines, from the acoustical and phonological point of view, the possibility of syllable stress being cancelled by the proximity of another stressed syllable. This idea was alredy pointed out more than a century ago in some treaties on metrics. The section here exposed only deals with Spanish, but in the dissertation a similar study has been done for French, English, Russian, Portuguese, Italian and Catalan. This issue has also been mentioned in the theoretical works on metrics and/or phonology. We conclude that there is a clear loss of acoustical prominence of one of the stressed syllables. We regard this fenomenon as a case of neutralization of the opposition [±stress), wich is similar to the neutralization of tones in Chinese (tone sandhi).