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In this paper we have analyzed the acoustic cues of Spanish stress (duration, amplitude, fundamental frequency) in the possessive mi in order to discover dialect differences between the North and the South of Peninsular Spanish. For this purpose, we have compared the possessives of three towns in the North and three in the South of Spain, using the recordings of the corpus COSER. Results empirically show that the values of duration, amplitude, and F0 in the possessives of both zones are similar, contradicting the literature on the topic. However, in Asturias the possessives have an accent linked to the left periphery and conditioned by the information structure of the sentence. This fact would explain the stressed values in the literature: the possessives in Asturias hold an accent (not stress) in specific positions different to other varieties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a non-normative phenomenon almost unknown in Spanish, the "pluralization" of adverbs in -mente (lugares realmentes sorprendentes 'places really surprising'), which is not found in the main grammars of this language. From the data of Corpus del español we propose to make known this phenomenon, to show in which countries it is documented and with what frequency. Later, we analyze which adverbs in -mente show this final -s in current Spanish and in what syntactic contexts are given. In particular, we show that the kind of adverbs that are involved in this phenomenon are degree, modality, and focusing adverbs, mainly when they modify adjectives or sentences. Finally, we propose an explanation of the presence of this final -s based on two different processes that the Spanish language undergoes in the grammatical category of adverbs: adverbial agreement, which so far has been described for quantifier adverbs, and adverb "false" pluralization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]