Some Observations about Proparoxytones and the Portuguese System of Accentuation

In Brazilian Portuguese, words with antepenultimate syllable stress are regarded as exceptions to lexical stress rules. Evidence for their exceptionality has been given in the literature: the late introduction of these words in the language, the predominant occurrence of the antepenultimate syllable stress in low frequency words, & the tendency of the language to shift stress to the penultimate syllable. Using a corpus of 18,413 words with antepenultimate stress & their respective phonological transcription from the Houaiss dictionary (Houaiss & Villar 2001), we argue that these claims are not always accurate & that words with antepenultimate stress are a long established & consistent pattern in the language. Furthermore, we show that stress shift to the penultimate syllable is not the rule, but it is only one possibility, restricted by the phonotactics of the language, & that preservation of antepenultimate stress is far more frequent. The data & analyses presented in this paper argue that prediction of lexical stress in Brazilian Portuguese must include words with the antepenultimate pattern, as there is no evidence that they are either disappearing in the language or being avoided by speakers. Adapted from the source document