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What Weighs for Word Stress? Big Data Mining and Analyses of Phonotactic Distributions in Brazilian Portuguese

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Computational Processing of the Portuguese Language (PROPOR 2018)

Abstract

For about four decades, phonological theories have claimed that word stress assignment depends on the word’s syllabic phonotactic complexity in relation to syllabic position. This study analyzes the phonotactic implications for word stress Brazilian Portuguese. After creating a phonotactic corpus and applying Random Forest modeling, phonotactic distributions for word stress were found to be bound to stress pattern and word length in number of syllables. To account for these observations, models of word naming must be extended with aspects of word stress.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Antepenultimate and final stress patterns are considered to be exceptional in Portuguese and have diacritics on the stressed vowel to mark stress in orthography.

  2. 2.

    The sequence /tS/ in X-SAMPA corresponds to one sound, the voiceless palato-alveolar affricate, which in IPA is represented by the symbol /ʧ/.

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Correspondence to Amanda Post da Silveira .

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Post da Silveira, A., Sanders, E., Mendonça, G., Dijkstra, T. (2018). What Weighs for Word Stress? Big Data Mining and Analyses of Phonotactic Distributions in Brazilian Portuguese. In: Villavicencio, A., et al. Computational Processing of the Portuguese Language. PROPOR 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11122. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99722-3_40

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99722-3_40

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