Stress on Accent; Errenteria Basque Revisited

In this paper we report an experiment of accentualplacement in Errenteria Basque. We compare data fromthree generations of speakers with the data described inprevious literature. The results show a mixed accentualsystem with marked and unmarked words (as previouslyaddressed in the literature). The relevant fact is that thephonological shape of the current unmarked words isdifferent from the descriptions in the literature since thecurrent one is a stress-accent system and the previous one suggests to be a pitch-accent system. Based on diachronic data, we show the direction of the phonological change and point a possible explanation for the development of the new accentual system based on Hualde's hypothesis