Dialectal variation in Galician verbs: conflicts and violations

This paper analyzes the Galician verb stress pattern from the Optimality Theory perspective (Prince & Smolensky 1993). Basic principals of this theoretical framework are applied to account for the differences in verbal stress assignment that we get in two different Galician dialects: Carballo/Val do Dubra and Santa Comba. I argue that the prosodic structure is predictable from the morphological composition of the verb. It is important to highlight that from the point of view of language acquisition, this system only requires the neonate to find positive evidence of which restriction dominates over the others.