This paper presents a first attempt to formally characterize the prosodic properties of Spanish acronyms. Based on the examination of a dataset and the results of a written questionnaire and perception test administered to native speakers, the stress patterns and prosodic size of Spanish acronyms are investigated. We show that stress in acronyms follows the regular stress patterns of the language. We further claim that acronyms are restricted to an upper limit of three syllables, which we explain by resorting to layered feet. Additionally, we show that an interesting minimality requirement applies exclusively to acronyms, one that must be expressed not in terms of syllable weight, but rather in terms of the number of segments.

In Modern Hebrew, some, but not all, nominals exhibit obligatory /a/-syncope in open syllables if they are antepretonic in a simple (nominal) word. The same vowels optionally syncopate in any pretonic syllable in non-final members of compounds. Here we first show that syncope in compounds fills a gap in the typology of weak positions. We then propose a formal analysis in Gradient Harmonic Grammar (Smolensky and Goldrick 2016), which distinguishes between a weak /a/ and a strong /a/. Only the former undergoes syncope in both configurations; and only in non-compounds is it protected by a positional faithfulness constraint referencing the head foot of the prosodic word. Optionality in compounds is shown to follow from Base-Derivative faithfulness.

According to Loporcaro's (2015) book on Romance length, contrastive vowel length in northern Italo-Romance is metrically-governed and implicationally distributed. CVL in proparoxytones implies CVL in paroxytones, but not the other way around. Likewise, CVL in paroxytones implies CVL in oxytones, but not vice versa. This paper develops a foot-based OT analysis of CVL in northern Italo-Romance that combines layered feet (Martínez-Paricio & Kager 2015) with uneven trochees (Jacobs 2019). The analysis adequately predicts the implicational distribution of CVL and discards unattested patterns.