The Inadequacy of a Faithfulness - Based Approach to Spanish Secondary Stress

The secondary stress pattern of Spanish occupies a key position in current debates in metrical stress theory. It is one of the patterns potentially capable of discriminating between accounts where distance-sensitive alignment constraints play a central role (McCarthy and Prince 1993, Gordon 2002, Hyde 2002) and accounts where they play a more restricted role (Alber 2005) or no role at all (Kager 2001, 2005; McCarthy 2003; Buckley 2009). Distance-insensitive alignment constraints simply distinguish between alignment and misalignment, preferring the former. Distance-sensitive alignment constraints distinguish between different degrees of misalignment, preferring smaller degrees of misalignment to greater degrees of misalignment. To illustrate, consider the constraints ALLFEET-Left, which is always taken to be distance-sensitive, and PRWD-LEFT, which is often taken to be distance-insensitive.