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Inquiries in Hispanic Linguistics: From theory to empirical evidence
Edited by Alejandro Cuza, Lori Czerwionka and Daniel Olson
[Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 12] 2016
► pp. 149–170

Stressed clitics in Argentine Spanish

Which way does the clitic lean?

| University of Toronto
| University of Toronto

The present paper investigates the phonological representation of stressed clitics in Argentine Spanish, building on the proposal of Colantoni and Cuervo (2013) that stressed clitics may be either affixes or independent words. This hypothesis is tested by comparing the acoustic characteristics (duration, pitch, intensity) of verbs followed by stressed clitics to verbs followed by stressed words and stressed affixes. The results indicate that stressed clitics pattern more like stressed affixes, leading to the conclusion that clitics are becoming more word internal.

Keywords: Argentine Spanish, Intonation, Phonetics, Phonology, Stressed clitics
Published online: 1 November 2016
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ihll.12.09kla
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