Primary Word Stress in Brazilian Portuguese and the Weight Parameter

Abstract

In this paper, we develop an analysis of primary word stress in Brazilian Portuguese (BP). We evaluate the typological and language-specific arguments that are presented in the literature against the relevance of syllable weight in Portuguese, and show that none of them appears to be valid when confronted with cross-linguistic evidence or the facts of BP phonology. We then go on to show that stress in BP represents a mixed system, in which verbs receive stress as a function of the morphological categories of tense (past, present, future), whereas stress in non-verbs is prosody-based and sensitive to the distinction between heavy and light syllables. We finally propose a constraint analysis of this system, which we claim functions in the lexical part of a stratified model.

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Wetzels, L., (2007) “Primary Word Stress in Brazilian Portuguese and the Weight Parameter”, Journal of Portuguese Linguistics 6(1), 9-58. doi: https://doi.org/10.5334/jpl.144

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Leo Wetzels (LPP – CNRS / Paris III and Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, Laboratoire de Phonétique et Phonologie (LPP), CNRS/Paris III – Sorbonne Nouvelle 19 Rue des Bernardins – 75005 Paris, France)

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