Comparing Lexical and Usage Frequencies of Palatal Segments in Portuguese (original) (raw)

Abstract

Palatal consonants in Portuguese are considered complex or marked segments because they are inherently heavy and restricted in terms of their distribution, in relation to other consonants. Moreover, they appear to display differences between themselves, as first language acquisition and creoles’ adaptation suggest that /ʎ/ is more complex than /ɲ/. The arguments for complexity are endorsed by some qualitative studies but are still lacking quantitative support. This paper aims at analyzing the phonological restrictiveness of these consonants by comparing their actual frequency in several different corpora, reporting both lexical entries and usage in discourse. In addition to their context-free frequency, we control for their word position and phonetic adjacency. We find that palatals are less frequent than other consonants. However, relative to each other, they do not display proportional lexical and usage frequencies. These results shed new light not only on the representation of /ɲ/ and /ʎ/ but also on the relation between frequency and markedness in language studies.

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Acknowledgment

This research was conducted within the doctoral program of Languages Sciences (Faculty of Arts-University of Porto), was funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT MCTES) through the PhD grant SFRH/BD/2020.07466.BD (Carlos Silva) and supported by the Center of Linguistics of the University of Porto (FCT-UIDB/00022/2020). We would like to thank Steven Moran and Rikke Bundgaard-Nielsen and three anonymous reviewers for the feedback and comments that greatly improved the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. LIACC Laboratório de Inteligência Artificial e Ciência de Computadores, University of Porto, Porto, Portugal
    Luís Trigo
  2. CLUP Centro de Linguística, University of Porto, Porto, Portugal
    Carlos Silva

Authors

  1. Luís Trigo
  2. Carlos Silva

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Universidade de Fortaleza, Fortaleza, Brazil
    Vládia Pinheiro
  2. CiTIUS - Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, Santiago de Compostela, Spain
    Pablo Gamallo
  3. Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal
    Raquel Amaro
  4. University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK
    Carolina Scarton
  5. INESC-ID, Lisbon, Portugal
    Fernando Batista
  6. Federal University of São Carlos, São Carlos, Brazil
    Diego Silva
  7. University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal
    Catarina Magro
  8. Sentimonitor, Porto Alegre, Brazil
    Hugo Pinto

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Trigo, L., Silva, C. (2022). Comparing Lexical and Usage Frequencies of Palatal Segments in Portuguese. In: Pinheiro, V., et al. Computational Processing of the Portuguese Language. PROPOR 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13208. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98305-5\_33

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