Spanish has a very strong tendency to put the nuclear accent on the last content word of the intonational phrase (remember that nuclear accent is not the highest point in the intonation contour), while in English it can appear on nonfinal words in many cases. Also, it is this final position in the sentence where new information is typically placed in Spanish. (What follows is based on Hualde 2005, pp. 257-260.)

It is important to make students aware of this syntactic characteristic of Spanish. Look at the following short dialogues and try to translate them into English.

In cases where the whole proposition conveys new information (so it could be the answer to the question what happened?), other morphosyntactic rules will determine word-order (these fall outside the scope of this course).

In the following sections, you will see several contexts where English and Spanish differ in the placement of nuclear accent.

Repeated information

In English, repeated information at the end of a sentence is generally deaccented, thus nuclear accent falls on an earlier word in the sentence. In Spanish, nuclear accent is normally kept at the end of the intonational phrase, even if it falls on noninformative words that constitute repeated information.

Similarly, where the prefix is the object of correction and everything else is repeated, the nuclear accent is placed on that syllable in English.

It is not an IMport business, it is an EXport business.

Whereas in Spanish, it is common to keep the accent on the lexically stressed syllable.

No es un negocio de importaCIÓN, es un negocio de exportaCIÓN.

Indefinite objects

In English, indefinite object pronouns are usually deaccented and pitch accent is placed on the verb.

Whereas in Spanish, pitch accent is kept on the final content word, in this case the indefinite pronoun.

Intransitive sentences

In simple neutral intransitive sentences, where the whole sentence is new information (remember, it can answer the question: what happened?), there is a preference in English to place the nuclear accent on the subject, rather than on the verb.

In Spanish, on the other hand, the unmarked word-order in many cases is to put the subject in postverbal position, which by virtue of its place in the sentence, will bear the nuclear accent.

Contrastive focus

Contrastive focus (also called narrow focus) refers to the information that is contrary to the presuppositions of the interlocutor.  For example, in the questions, Your dad helped you with the work, didn´t he? or Did your dad help you with the work?, the presupposition is that it was our interlocutor´s father who helped. If the answer contradicts this presupposition, the new information is a contrastive focus and nuclear accent will be placed on it (indicated by capitals).

In Spanish, the word order is changed in such a way that the expression with contrastive focus is in final position, since this is a special case of new information.

Activity

Listen to this student talking and reflect on her rhythm and intonation. Give her some constructive feedback.

Feedback: Student 1 

You can compare your answer with ours in Section 6.

Gil, Juana (ed.) Aproximación a la enseñanza de la pronunciación en el aula de español, 2012, Edinumen. 

Hualde, José Ignacio. The Sounds of Spanish, 2005, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Pellegrino, François & Coupé, Christophe & Marsico, Egidio. "Across-Language Perspective on Speech Information Rate." Language, vol. 87 no. 3, 2011, pp. 539-558. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/lan.2011.0057