Primary Word Stress in Brazilian Portuguese and the Weight Parameter

W. Léo Wetzels (1)

1 LPP - LPP - Laboratoire de Phonétique et Phonologie - UMR 7018

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.

Mots clés: phonologie; accent de mot; portugais du Brésil

Domaines: Linguistique

W. Léo Wetzels. Primary Word Stress in Brazilian Portuguese and the Weight Parameter. Journal of Portuguese Linguistics, 2007, 5/6, pp.9-58. ⟨halshs-00684325⟩