Sobre la cantidad silábica y su importancia para el estudio de la evolución histórica del acento no verbal en la transición del latín al español

Laburpena

The historical evolution of word stress is undoubtedly among the most neglected topics in the diachronic study of Spanish. According to the traditional view, the loss of phonemic quantitative distinctions in Vulgar Latin caused the Proto Hispano-Romance loss of sensitivity to syllable weight. That the presumed loss of the correlation between stress locus and syllable quantity, reformulated as the emergence of phonemic stress in the modern language, is patently misguided, is shown by the predictability of the unmarked pattern: stress falls on a heavy final syllable; otherwise, it falls on the penult. This work has two main goals: a) to present diachronic evidence that syllable weight has remained active throughout the historical evolution of Spanish; and b) to show that correlation between the weight of the penult and the locus of stress, inherited from Latin, continued to be a determining factor in non-verbal stress assignment since the formative period of Spanish and until the medieval apocope stage, when oxytonic stress conditioned by a heavy final became established as the pattern of unmarked nominal word stress in modern Spanish.