What are the tonic words

Image: Spelling accent

In Spanish, not all words are the same from the point of view of accentuation. Some are pronounced with an accent and, therefore, are considered tonic words, compared to others that lack it, and for this reason, they are called unstressed words. Having established this distinction, we can draw the distinction between tonic words, which are those that have a prosodic accent on some of the syllables that constitute them, and, on the other hand, unstressed words, which do not have an accent and need to be accompanied by a stressed word during the speech to be able to pronounce.

In this lesson from a TEACHER we will study carefully what are the tonic words, seeing various examples of them and also, reviewing some important concepts such as the types of syllables in Spanish, as well as the stressed syllable.

In Spanish, a distinction is made between the syllables that make up a word that is essential for the study of syntax in Spanish. In addition, when placing the graphic accent on the stressed syllable of a word, it is essential to know

Thus, there are different criteria for studying syllables in Spanish. For us in this article, the most important and relevant is that of tonality, that is, the one that starts from the strength or charge of the voice that we use when pronouncing one syllable or another. Following the reference of tonality, two different types of syllables are established:

Stressed syllables

The Dictionary of the real academy (RAE) defines the stressed syllable as that "that has a prosodic accent"; that is, within the syllable there is an accented vowel both at the prosody level and at the orthographic level. On the other hand, depending on what the stressed syllable is within a word, we establish different types of words that vary in their classification based on the position of the graphic accent or tilde; thus, we can find ourselves with sharp, flat or esdrújulas words.

Unstressed syllables

The unstressed syllables are those that they do not have voice load or tonal intensity, so that it is necessary that they rely on another stressed syllable to be able to pronounce themselves throughout the speech. For this reason, unstressed syllables are never graphically stressed.

Image: ABC

Once we have reviewed the concept of stressed syllable, we can affirm that, therefore, a stressed word in Spanish can be defined as one that contains a graphic accent or tilde on any of its syllables, which would be, in that case, the tonic syllable constituting the word.

On the other hand, it is important to be clear about the following: not all stressed syllables that make up stressed words are graphically stressed, although they contain a prosodic accent, but it is necessary to always keep in mind the rules of accentuation of the Spanish language, through which we determine that words like home, dinner, elephant, daughter or Tuesday they are not accentuated because they are plain words (the blow of the voice in the third to last syllable) ending in a vowel or in "-s".

While it is mandatory to accentuate words like ham, heart, song O well camera archaeologist or music; the first because they are sharp words (the blow of the voice is on the last syllable) that end in "-n" and the second because they are sdrújulas words (the blow of voice falls on the third to last syllable), and they must always have a graphic accent or accent mark.

The distinction between stressed syllable and unstressed syllable allows us to be able to correctly divide words according to their number of syllables. This, accompanied by knowledge of the rules of graphic accentuation that Real academy of the Spanish language (RAE) puts at our disposal, helps us to write correctly and avoid committing mistakes in spelling due to ignorance of where we should place the graphic accent, in case we have to do it.

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