Weight gradience and stress in Portuguese

Abstract

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 monotonically weaken 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 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.

The computation of weight in Portuguese: syllables and intervals

“…4). 7 7 Segmental quality is not discussed here-see Garcia (2014 Ordinal Regressions, also known as Cumulative Link Models, treat responses as ordered factors. As a result, the stress domain in Portuguese is treated as a 3-point scale: 1 = final stress, 2 = penult stress and 3 = antepenult stress.…”

“…2 Guilherme Duarte Garcia, McGill University, guilherme.garcia@mail.mcgill.ca. This paper is expanded in Garcia (2014). Many thanks to Heather Goad (McGill) and Morgan Sonderegger (McGill), for crucial comments on earlier versions of this paper.…”

“…All errors are mine. 1 For a full discussion on Portuguese stress, please see Garcia (2014). 2 See Wetzels (2007) for a comprehensive discussion.…”

“…Finally, an R (R Core Team 2014) script cleaned and filtered the corpus, adding information about intervals and syllables. The analysis that follows is based on the resulting corpus (n=154,083), to which I will refer as the Portuguese Stress Corpus, or PSC (Garcia 2014).…”

“…Even though the objective here is not to examine spoken Portuguese, it was important to check how different the lexicon was when compared to a frequency corpora vis-à-vis stress. Overall, the all corpora had relatively similar proportions (seeGarcia (2014)). …”