Weight gradience and stress in Portuguese

Weight gradience and stress in Portuguese

This paper examines the role of weight in stress assignment in the Portuguese lexicon, and proposes a probabilistic approach to stress. I show that weight effects are gradient, and weaken monotonically as we move away from the right edge of the word. Such effects depend on the position of a syllable...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Phonology Vol. 34; no. 1; pp. 41 - 79
Main Author: Garcia, Guilherme D.
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Cambridge, UK Cambridge University Press 01-05-2017
Subjects:
Accentuation
Grammar
Phonemes
Phonology
Portuguese language
Rhyme
Romance Languages
Stress
Suprasegmentals
Syllables
Verbs
Vowels
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Summary:This paper examines the role of weight in stress assignment in the Portuguese lexicon, and proposes a probabilistic approach to stress. I show that weight effects are gradient, and weaken monotonically as we move away from the right edge of the word. Such effects depend on the position of a syllable in the word, as well as on the number of segments the syllable contains. The probabilistic model proposed in this paper is based on a single predictor, namely weight, and yields more accurate results than a categorical analysis, where weight is treated as binary. Finally, I discuss implications for the grammar of Portuguese.
ISSN:0952-6757
1469-8188
DOI:10.1017/S0952675717000033