Hiatus in Argentinian Spanish

In this paper, I deal with the syllabification of an unstressed high vowel (H) followed by a vowel (V) in a CHV context. Unstressed H is expected to surface as a glide. However, in some cases it is a full vowel: word-initially and with stress on V or one syllable at the right of the word-initial sequence; at the boundary between two stems in compounds when stress is on V. I propose that hiatus in these environments is a means of providing a perceptual cue for edges and boundaries of words.