The phonology of rhythm from Classical to Modern Portuguese

Sónia Frota | Universidade de Lisboa

Charlotte Galves | Universidade de Campinas

Marina Vigário | Universidade de Lisboa

Verónica Gonzalez-Lopez | Universidade de Campinas

Bernadete Abaurre | Universidade de Campinas

The prosodic change that has been reported to have occurred from Classical to Modern Portuguese is investigated by means of a new approach to the study of rhythm in language change. Assuming that rhythm is a by-product of the presence/absence of a set of properties in a given linguistic system, we computed frequency information on rhythm-related properties from written texts of the 16th to the 19th centuries, by means of the electronic tool FreP. Results show a change in the distributions of properties related to word stress and prosodic word shape after the 16th century, indicating that the prosodic change occurred between the 16th and 17th centuries. A predictive analysis based on Bayesian statistics provided strong support for the timing of the change, and successfully modelled our data showing a timeline consistent with the direction of the prosodic shift towards the integration of stress-timing properties into Romance syllable-timed rhythm.

Keywords: rhythm, prosodic change, frequency, Classical Portugese, European Portugese

Published online: 25 February 2013
https://doi.org/10.1075/jhl.2.2.02fro

Cited by

Cited by other publications

Cruz, Marisa, Pedro Oliveira, Pedro Palma, Bruno Neto & Sónia Frota

2017. In Studies on Variation in Portuguese [Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, 14], ► pp. 82 ff.

García, Jesús E. & V. A. González-López

2014. Modeling of Acoustic Signal Energies with a Generalized Frank Copula. A Linguistic Conjecture is Reviewed. Communications in Statistics - Theory and Methods 43:10-12 ► pp. 2034 ff.

García, Jesús E., V. A. González-López & M. L. L. Viola

2014. Robust Model Selection for Stochastic Processes. Communications in Statistics - Theory and Methods 43:10-12 ► pp. 2516 ff.

García, Jesús E., V.A. González-López & R.B. Nelsen

2013. A new index to measure positive dependence in trivariate distributions. Journal of Multivariate Analysis 115 ► pp. 481 ff.

García, Jesús Enrique, Ramin Gholizadeh & Verónica Andrea González‐López

2020. In Data Analysis and Applications 4, ► pp. 185 ff.

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 03 january 2021. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.