Saber linguístico na acentuação do português

Abstract

This article discusses stress placement in Portuguese nominal forms ending in a consonant, confronting the considerations of our early orthographers and grammatians - to whom stress is related to the phonological structure of the final syllable - with the assumptions of generative phonologists - to whom stress is determined by the morphological constitution of the word. The issue is examined taking into account the knowledge - neither learned nor taught - held by Portuguese speakers, and which is manifested in stress assignment to neologisms, in stress errors, as well as in assigning stress to nonsense words. There is an account of an experiment in which nonsense words, presented as thematic or non-thematic stems ending in either a vowel or a consonant, are constrated by supplying morphological information constituted of derivational suffixes. The data indicate that the presence of the consonant in the final syllable corresponds to a significantly higher stress assignment frequency to the syllable than the presence of morphological information. These results are more consistent with the intuitions and prescriptions of the grammarians and orthographers than with the assumtions of the generative phonologists.