| This dissertation explores opposing quantity sensitive and quantity insensitive patterns present in the prosody, stress assignment and prosodic morphological processes such as truncation, of the different Ibero-Romance languages (Catalan, Spanish and Portuguese) and argues that a coherent account that integrates both is available in the theoretical framework of Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993 [2002]). This dissertation represents, to the best of my knowledge, the first attempt to analyze together in one study both the stress assignment and prosodic morphology of any Ibero-Romance language. Whereas individual studies dealing only with stress assignment or only prosodic morphology processes in Ibero-Romance languages are abundant, there is not much scholarly research on both stress placement and prosodic morphology combined. This dissertation explores, first, stress and prosodic morphological patterns in several Ibero-Romance languages (Catalan, Portuguese and Spanish). Second, we show two languages, Valencian Catalan and Portuguese, displaying a combination of quantitative prosodic patterns that are unrepresented in the literature: the Valencian variety of Catalan and Portuguese exhibit a quantity sensitive stress pattern and a quantity insensitive truncatory morphology. Only the opposite pattern (that is, quantity insensitive stress and quantity sensitive prosodic morphology) had been attested in the literature, i.e., Tohono O'odham, in Fitzgerald (2002, 2003, 2004). Apart from its empirical value, this study is one of the only works to examine opposing quantitative patterns through the lens of Optimality Theory. The analysis proposed in this study deals adequately with "contradictory" quantity patterns by claiming an initial constraint ranking where constraints that promote quantity insensitivity outrank others promoting quantity sensitivity. |
