Variable secondary stress

and weight-sensitivity in Portuguese

Guilherme D. Garcia

ball state university

guilhermegarcia.github.io

Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (BLS)

University of California, Berkeley, Feb 2020

Garcia Variable secondary stress and weight-sensitivity in Portuguese 2020

Intro

Secondary stress typically not a�ected by weight (Gordon 2006)

Finnish:

Primary stress is word initial

Secondary stress a�ected by weight1

(Lehiste 1965)

+ Light syllables skipped if followed by heavy syllable

1

Also see Pater (2000) for English.

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Finnish

a. ka.las.te.let ‘you are fishing’

b. ka.las.te.lem.me ‘we are fishing’ skipping with H

c. fı.lo.so.fıs.sa ‘philosopher-ine’ no skipping with H

d. a.te.ri.a.na ‘meal-ess’ skipping with L

e. pro.fes.so.rıs.sa ∼ pro.fes.so.ris.sa ‘professor-ine’ variation

Sonority & clash avoidance play a role in variation (Anttila 2010)

+ Lexical⇔ post-lexical planes (Dresher and van der Hulst 1998)

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Portuguese

Primary stress in non-verbs

Trisyllabic domain: σσσ]

Primary stress a�ected by weight (Wetzels 2007; Garcia 2017)

Regular stress:

XXH→ XXH jornal, papel ‘newspaper’, ‘paper’

XXL→ XXL borboleta, cavalo ‘butterfly’, ‘horse’

Irregular stress

XXL abacaxı ‘pineapple’

XXH nıvel ‘level’

XXX patetico ‘pathetic’

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Portuguese

Secondary stress in non-verbs

Secondary stress weight-insensitive (Collischonn 1994, p. 45)

Stress every other pre-tonic syllable R-L

a. ınternacional ‘international’

borboleta ‘butterfly’

paralelepıpedo ‘block paving’

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Portuguese

Secondary stress in non-verbs

Variation: odd number of pre-tonic syllables

b. cacofonıa ∼ cacofonıa ‘cacophony’

melhoramento ∼ melhoramento ‘improvement’

+ Either initial or peninitial secondary stress

Could weight a�ect variation in secondary stress?

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Methods

Auditory judgment task in Praat (Boersma and Weenink 2020)

Nonce words in Portuguese (n = 120)

Native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese (n = 20)

stimuli

5-syl

LHLHLHLLHLLLLHL

4-syl

(controls)

LHHLHLHLLLHL

Minimal pairs: initial vs. peninitial secondary stress

argadorıste ∼ argadorıste

morilante ∼ morılante (control)

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Methods

Stimuli

+ Correlate for stress in Portuguese: duration (Major 1985; Moraes 2003)

Secondary stress→ harder to capture:

Acoustic evidence not robust for Spanish (Hualde and Nadeau 2014)

I Similar situation for Portuguese:

Some (most?) studies point to duration (e.g., Moraes 2003)

Some to intensity (Fernandes-Svartman et al. 2008)

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Methods

Duration in stimuli: 4σ (controls)

+ Durational pattern for secondary stress in stimuli

Recorded by native speaker with phonetic training

Initial

100ms

300ms

500ms

1 2 3 4

Syllable

Peninitial

100ms

300ms

500ms

1 2 3 4

Syllable

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Methods

Duration in stimuli: 5σ

+ Durational pattern for secondary stress in stimuli

Recorded by native speaker with phonetic training

Initial

100ms

300ms

500ms

1 2 3 4 5

Syllable

Peninitial

100ms

300ms

500ms

1 2 3 4 5

Syllable

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Main results

Initial stress overall favored over peninitial stress

4- and 5-syllable words: expected di�erence

Syllables: 4 (controls) Syllables: 5

HLHL LHHL LLHL HLLHL LHLHL LLLHL0%

25%

50%

75%

100%

Initi

al s

tres

s pr

efer

ence

LLLHL � HLLHL � LHLHL

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Main results

Hierarchical logistic regression (50% and 95% CIs)

initial ∼ weight + (1 + weight | ID)

LL*

LH

HL

-1.5 -0.5 0.5 1.5

Posterior distribution (β)

I Positive β → initial secondary stress

Results interpreted relative to intercept (LL*)

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Reaction time

Trends

Overall: faster RTs when choosing initial secondary stress

Syllables: 4 (controls) Syllables: 5

HLHL LHHL LLHL HLLHL LHLHL LLLHL

-0.1

0.0

0.1

0.2

RT

(st

d)

initialpeninitial

+ but even faster for 4-syl words

Speakers also more certain when choosing initial stress

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Coda sonority

Trends

+ Initial stress preferred when coda contains liquid or nasal

I No clear trend in control items (4-syllable words)

Syllables: 4 (controls)Weight: HLHL

Syllables: 4 (controls)Weight: LHHL

Syllables: 5Weight: HLLHL

Syllables: 5Weight: LHLHL

obs LN obs LN obs LN obs LN0%

25%

50%

75%

100%

Sonority

Initi

al s

tres

s pr

efer

ence

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Summary and discussion

I Overall: bias towards initial secondary stress

Stronger bias for 4σ words (clash avoidance)

I Location of Hσ seems to a�ect speakers’ judgements:

HLLHL � LHLHL

+ Lexical⇔ post-lexical planes (Dresher and van der Hulst 1998)

Why LLLHL � HLLHL?

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Summary and discussion

50% ambiguity:

Speakers consistently find both options good

Speakers consistently find both options not so good

Syllables: 4 (controls) Syllables: 5

HLHL LHHL LLHL HLLHL LHLHL LLLHL0%

25%

50%

75%

100%

Initi

al s

tres

s pr

efer

ence

Hypothesis: presence of 2 Hσ seen as less natural

+ Confound in stimuli given lexical distribution of weight

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Summary and discussion

≈90% of all words in Portuguese have 0/1 Hσ (Garcia 2014)

+ Same distribution when we control for frequency: (Tang 2012)

Hs: 0 Hs: 1 Hs: 2 Hs: 3

0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 10 0 5 100

500

1000

1500

Frequency (log)

(Whether or not we examine 4-5σ words vs. all words)

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Summary and discussion

Could duration in the stimuli explain speakers’ preferences?

A Initial:Peninitial ratio in ithitem with initial stress

B Initial:Peninitial ratio in ithitem with peninitial stress

+ Overall ratio A:B shows longer duration for initial σ

Main results (again)

0%

25%

50%

75%

100%

HLLHL LHLHL LLLHL

Initi

al s

tres

s pr

efer

ence

Ratios

0.0

0.5

1.0

1.5

2.0

HLLHL LHLHL LLLHL

Initial:Peninitial

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Final remarks and future directions

Next steps:

A. Do we observe the same patterns with LLL]ω stimuli?

B. Can durational ratios alone explain LLLHL > HLLHL?

C. Does production mirror judgements?

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Thank you!

This research is funded by Ball State University [19-0214]

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References

Anttila, A. (2010). Word stress in Finnish. Handout, Yale University.

Boersma, P. and Weenink, D. (2020). Praat: doing phonetics by computer [Computer program].

Collischonn, G. (1994). Acento secundario em portugues. Letras de Hoje, 29(4):43–55.

Dresher, B. E. and van der Hulst, H. (1998). Head-dependent asymmetries in phonology: complexity and visibility. Phonology,

15(3):317–352.

Fernandes-Svartman, F., Abaurre, M. B., and Gonzalez-Lopez, V. A. (2008). Acento secundarop e intensidade em portugues

brasileiro. In Anais do 80◦ Encontro do CELSUL, pages 1–18, Porto Alegre.

Garcia, G. D. (2014). Portuguese Stress Lexicon. Comprehensive list of non-verbs in Portuguese. Available at

http://guilhermegarcia.github.io/psl.html.

Garcia, G. D. (2017). Weight gradience and stress in Portuguese. Phonology, 34(1):41–79.

Gordon, M. (2006). Syllable weight: phonetics, phonology, typology. Routledge, New York.

Hualde, J. I. and Nadeau, M. (2014). Rhetorical stress in Spanish. In van der Hulst, H., editor, Word stress: theoretical andtypological issues, pages 228–254. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Lehiste, I. (1965). The function of quantity in Finnish and Estonian. Language, 41(3):447–456.

Major, R. C. (1985). Stress and rhythm in Brazilian Portuguese. Language, 61(2):259–282.

Moraes, J. a. (2003). Secondary stress in Brazilian Portuguese: perceptual and acoustic evidence. In XVth ICPhS, pages

2063–2066, Barcelona.

Pater, J. (2000). Nonuniformity in English secondary stress: The role of ranked and lexically specific constraints. Phonology,

17(2):237–274.

Tang, K. (2012). A 61 million word corpus of Brazilian Portuguese film subtitles as a resource for linguistic research. UCLWorking Papers in Linguistics 24: 208–214.

Wetzels, W. L. (2007). Primary word stress in Brazilian Portuguese and the weight parameter. Journal of PortugueseLinguistics, 5:9–58.

Garcia Variable secondary stress and weight-sensitivity in Portuguese References

Durational di�erences

Initial vs. peninitial

HLLHL LHLHL LLLHL

initialpeninitial

1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5

100ms

300ms

500ms

100ms

300ms

500ms

Syllable

Garcia Variable secondary stress and weight-sensitivity in Portuguese Appendix