Secondary stress in two varieties of Portuguese and the Sotaq optimality based computer program

Abstract

This paper presents an analysis of secondary stress in Brazilian and European Portuguese (BP and EP) based on Optimality Theory (OT). We argue that a representational analysis has the following advantages: (i) generating all the facts of Brazilian and European Portuguese without postulating any cases of absolute neutralization; (ii) not forcing the usage of the notion of directionality, thus implying a simplification of the phonological theory; and (iii) being able to generate variant forms in parallel. We have developed a computer program, sotaq, that tests proposed stress systems (formulated in terms of constraint hierarchies) for both varieties of Portuguese against observed actual stresses and in large corpora, thus allowing for automatic testing of Optimality Theory predictions for secondary stress.