Prosodic generalizations in the Brazilian Portuguese diphthongal plural
Michael Becker, Andrew Nevins, Filomena Sandalo, and Érick RizzatoArticle (pdf)
Michael Becker, Andrew Nevins, Filomena Sandalo, and Érick Rizzato (accepted) Prosodic generalizations in the Brazilian Portuguese diphthongal plural. Journal of Portuguese Linguistics.
Abstract
The diphthongal plural in Brazilian Portuguese is sensitive to three phonological factors: monosyllabicity, licensing of nasal diphthongs by stress, and vertical dispersion of oral diphthongs. We present an analysis that captures the gradient distribution of the Brazilian Portuguese plurals ending in diphthongs, both oral and nasal, using a probabilistic grammar based on the well-understood factors mentioned above. This grammar is trained on corpus data and is sensitive to prosodic generalizations; it correctly derives existing plurals while accurately generalizing beyond individual lexical items and predicting participants’ choices in nonce word tasks. The results are incompatible with analyses that apply uniformly to all lexical items, as well as with those that simply memorize semipredictable plurals without incorporating phonologically-based generalizations.
Materials and results
lexicon and experimental results (zip)Contact info
Michael Becker, michael.becker@phonologist.orgAndrew Nevins, a.nevins@ucl.ac.uk
Filomena Sandalo, fsandalo@gmail.com
Érick Rizzato, erickrizzato@gmail.com