Secondary stress and metrical rhythm

Abstract

This paper explores the relationship between some postlexical prosodic processes and metrical rhythm. The main focus is on Spanish secondary stress and related phenomena. Overall, as in previous studies, we shall differentiate three types of stress in Spanish: primary word stress, corresponding to the highest prominence in the lexical word, main phrasal stress, which signals the accentual peak in the phrase or phonic group, and secondary stress, which includes all remaining discernible stresses. It is intuitively plausible, though unsubstantiated experimentally, to assume that these three types correlate with three different degrees of prominence, of which main phrasal stress is the highest and secondary stress the lowest.