Fontes do acento paroxítono do português brasileiro

Abstract

The present work intends to make a diachronic stress and synchronic analysis of paroxytone words terminated in consonante in Brasilian Portuguese paroxytone. Therefore, we selected all the paroxitone words ending in consonant of the dictionary Houaiss (2015) and we looked for an explanation in the origin of these words considered irregular by the literature. In the synchronic counterpart, we created four different groups of words: Group A, with pseudo-words ending in consonant; Group B, with paroxytone words of the language, in which we remove the diacritic accent; Group C, with pseudo-words finished in consonant and accented graphically in the penultimate syllable and Group D, with oxytone words of the language marked with a penultimate stress. The objective of our synchronic test was to describe how the speaker accentuates words ending in each of the consonants L, R, S, X and M/N in the contexts of each of the above groups. The theoretical models that guided the work were the Metrical Phonology of Hayes (1995), who helped us to describe and demonstrate the stress allocation as well as the foot types of all languages; and Selkirk's (1982) syllabic model, which we used to represent the changes that occurred in syllabic structures. The results obtained from the diachronic analysis show that the postulated irregularity does not exist, since the stress in the words remains in the same position of the primitive language namely, Classic Latin; what happens, in these words, is a syllabic rearrangement. The synchronic results showed that this irregularity can be observed, since most of the participants have stressed he words as paroxytones, which is contrary to the general rule of Portuguese to mark words ending with a consonante as oxytone.