ABSTRACT
Word-formation processes such as inflection, derivation and compounding typically involve morpheme concatenation. Prosodic morphology typically comprises infixation, truncation and reduplication. In Spanish, two processes are clear instances of prosodic morphology: blending and truncation. This chapter focuses on these two word-formation processes and approaches the phenomena from the perspective of Generalized Template Theory, which combines the premises of prosodic morphology with Optimality Theory and Correspondence Theory. The most common pattern observed in Spanish truncation corresponds to disyllabic forms with initial stress that preserve the left portion of the base. Blending is a word-formation process that derives nouns from merging two or more freestanding words through either truncation of one or more of the members from which the blended form derives and/or through overlapping of members. Blending is a subtype of compounding as blended forms are made up of two or more words, although some of them are phonologically restricted in that the output of blending must be a single prosodic word.
