The Phonetics of Stress Manifestation: Syllable Constituency, Segmental Variation, and Rhythm

This book is concerned with how lexical stress in Spanish is phonetically manifested within the syllable, and how stress manifestation interacts with other prosodic effects, such as phrasal accent and initial word-boundary effects. One of the challenges in the study of prosody is the fact that multiple prosodic factors induce variation in a limited number of phonetic dimensions. For this reason, results in the literature have often been inconclusive or conflicting. The disentanglement of these prosodic effects will help us understand the complex nature of prosody. In addition, the investigation of the phonetics of prosody manifestation provides us insight into interrelations among prosodic factors, and the systematicity behind the complexity of prosodic effects. It is hoped that this book contributes to a better understanding of prosody as a well-structured grammatical component, and its connections to segmental phenomena in languages.