Insights into Spanish metrical structure through language games

Abstract

Some Spanish language games involve reordering the syllables of the words. However, the stressed syllable of the game word does not always match the stressed syllable in the original Spanish word and/or the position of the stress in the original Spanish word. Using game words found in different sources, a corpus of 261 words from different Spanish games was created to account for the games’ stress patterns. The metrical structure of the language games (e.g., Vesre, which is a game in Argentina and Uruguay) was analyzed. The results of the analysis suggest that the game words’ metrical structures are composed of quantity-sensitive, right-aligned trochee, in which the stress falls in penultimate position in vowel-final words, and consonant-final words generally have final stress, confirming previous proposals about the default metrical structure of Spanish (Harris, 1983; Núñez-Cedeño and Morales-Front, 1999). Overall, these Spanish language games illustrate The Emergence of The Unmarked (TETU) in metrical structure, providing evidence of Spanish stress assignment, whereby the unmarked stress pattern is a right-aligned quantity-sensitive trochee.