ISCA Archive SpeechProsody 2014
ISCA Archive SpeechProsody 2014

Lexical Stress in Brazilian Portuguese in Contrast with Spanish

Antônio Simões

This study discusses stress assignment in prosodic, non-verbal words in Brazilian Portuguese, in comparison with descriptions of stress assignment for Spanish [9, 13, 15, 16, 17, 18]. Given the conflicting claims regarding stress assignment in Brazilian Portuguese (see [11, 1, 2, 10, 3]) there is still a need to revisit discussions on stress assignment in Portuguese. In general, stress assignment in Spanish has been satisfactorily explained through the interplay between the morphological and phonological domains. Similar descriptions for Portuguese still requires far more abstraction and use of artifacts than in Spanish, which makes Mattoso Cmara Jr.’s [4, 5] claim that lexical stress is unpredictable in Brazilian Portuguese surprisingly unchallenged.