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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 ...
Spanish is usually considered a syllable-timed language. Even so, stressed syllables may be up to 50% longer in duration than non-stressed syllables. [93] [94] [95] Although pitch, duration, and loudness contribute to the perception of stress, [96] pitch is the most important in isolation. [97]
Some languages, such as English, are said to be stress-timed languages; that is, stressed syllables appear at a roughly constant rate and non-stressed syllables are shortened to accommodate that, which contrasts with languages that have syllable timing (e.g. Spanish) or mora timing (e.g. Japanese), whose syllables or moras are spoken at a ...
The same process also affects stressed front and back vowels in hiatus if they are antepenultimate (in the third-to-last syllable of a word). When /j/ is produced, primary stress shifts to the following vowel, but when /w/ is produced, primary stress shifts instead to the preceding syllable, as in /fiːˈliolus, teˈnueram/ > /fiːˈljolus ...
A word with preantepenultimate stress (on the fourth last syllable) or earlier does not have a common linguistic term in English, but in Spanish receives the name sobresdrújula. (Spanish words can be stressed only on one of the last three syllables, except in the case of a verb form with enclitic pronouns, such as poniéndoselo or llévesemelo.)
Isochrony is a linguistic analysis or hypothesis assuming that any spoken language's utterances are divisible into equal rhythmic portions of some kind. Under this assumption, languages are proposed to broadly fall into one of two categories based on rhythm or timing: syllable-timed or stress-timed languages [1] (or, in some analyses, a third category: mora-timed languages). [2]
For example, Spanish casar ("to marry") is composed of an open syllable followed by a closed syllable (ca-sar), whereas cansar "to get tired" is composed of two closed syllables (can-sar). When a geminate (double) consonant occurs, the syllable boundary occurs in the middle, e.g. Italian panna "cream" ( pan-na ); cf. Italian pane "bread" ( pa-ne ).
Note that the stress of a word in Spanish, such as constituCIÓN, often is different from the stress of the cognate (related) word in English: constiTUtion. The Spanish Academy, in the early 19th century, set rules for the use of the accent as a marker of syllable stress. There are three rules, unchanged for some 200 years: