Stress-clash management strategies used in chilean Spanish

Abstract

The following research deals with the intonation of utterances in Chilean Spanish with stress clashes: the presence of two or more successive stressed syllables. In order to do this, and from the perspective of acoustic analysis, an experiment was devised to observe the frequency of use of each of the seven main stress clash management strategies reported in the literature (Prieto et al., 1995; Almeida, 2001). The results support the notion of tonal peaks as targets (Prieto, 2003) and the expected use of a single tonal peak in contexts of stress clash. They also establish some unexpected relationships between certain sets of the aforementioned strategies; as well as between utterances with different prosodic patterns. Based on the results of this investigation, this paper also attempts to propose a tentative categorization of stress clash management strategies in order to improve the current understanding of stress in Spanish and to facilitate future research in this area.