Paradigmaticity effects in Spanish verb stress

Although much of what has been written on Spanish verb stress shares the intuition that it depends on the interaction of phonological and morphological factors, its study is hindered by the fact that it is focused from an exclusively morphosyntactic or phonological point of view in some cases whereas in others relevance is given only to morphological structure. This paper places the interaction of phonology and morphology in the center of the reflection on Spanish verb stress. After briefly examining the correlation that exists between so-called inflectional segments and lexical stress, we review the most relevant analyses concerning Spanish verb stress from a morphosyntactic and morphological point of view. We suggest that one of the most serious flaws of the former has to do with the fact that they lose sight of the more characteristic specificity of verbal forms, namely that they are part of subparadigms that have stress uniformity as one of their essential features. On the other hand, morphological analyses tend to be based on the idea of a strict symmetry between temporal and accentual subparadigms, and, therefore, to propose morphological explanations, which, however, do not seem to be consistent with the stress patterns typical of present forms and so-called strong preterites. We aim to show that the interest of the notion of subparadigm manifests itself most clearly in an analysis that takes into account the phonological and morphological factors associated with stress regularity and markedness, besides distinguishing morphological and accentual subparadigms. We also suggest that the effects of these factors are best examined on the basis of the subsets (temporal, tempomodal subparadigms) that make up the verbal system, i.e., taking into account the characteristics of the forms included in each subset as well as the relationships in which they are involved. From this point of view, the accentual profile of each subparadigm depends on the interaction of strictly prosodic requirements with morphological factors such as morphoprosodic leveling, lexical stress, and what we will call subparadigmatic or positional stress. Whereas the effects of this interaction have a more or less local range, the factors involved in it determine the paradigmaticity effects observed in Spanish conjugation and, ultimately, the degree of morphologization of verb stress in Spanish