Garcia, G. D. (2019). When lexical statistics and the grammar conflict: learning and repairing weight effects on stress. Language 95(4):612–641.

Abstract

In weight-sensitive languages, stress is inﬂuenced by syllable weight. As a result, heavy syllables should attract, not repel, stress. The Portuguese lexicon, however, presents a case where weight seems to negatively impact stress: antepenultimate stress is more frequent in light antepenultimate syllables than in heavy ones. This pattern is phonologically unexpected, and appears to contradict the typology of weight and stress: it is a case where lexical statistics and the grammar conﬂict. Portuguese also contains gradient, not categorical, weight eﬀects, which weaken as we move away from the right edge of the word. In this paper, I examine how native speakers’ grammars capture these subtle weight eﬀects, and whether the negative antepenultimate weight eﬀect is learned or repaired. I show that speakers learn the gradient weight eﬀects in the language, but do not learn the unnatural negative eﬀect. Instead, speakers repair this pattern, and generalize a positive weight eﬀect to all syllables in the stress domain. This study thus provides empirical evidence that speakers may not only ignore unnatural patterns, but also learn the opposite pattern.

Keywords: stress, weight, lexical statistics, Bayes, probabilistic grammar, MaxEnt

### How to cite

TeX
@article{garcia_2019_lg,
Author = {Garcia, Guilherme Duarte},
Title = {When lexical statistics and the grammar conflict:
learning and repairing weight effects on stress},
Journal = {Language},
Volume = {95},
Number = {4},
Pages = {612--641},
Year = {2019},
Doi = {10.1353/lan.2019.0068}}