International Journal of Language & Linguistics

A Word Prosodic Algorithm for Brazilian Portuguese
Vera Vasilévski, Leonor Scliar-Cabral, Márcio José Araújo

Abstract
A presentation of a word rule-based algorithm that pinpoints the position of the word stressed syllable in a text, processes the data, and displays them as a statistical report. As a result, the output is the stress patterns of the respective language. This algorithm is one of a variety of tools available to researchers in Brazilian Portuguese. The algorithm focused on here works on the results of a grapheme to phoneme converter and syllable parser, which reads written texts and translates them into Brazilian Portuguese phonological patterns, by using the IPA symbols. This word algorithm may also be useful for research on Portuguese language stress, since, while decoding graphemes, it always preserves this particular prosody feature, that is, primary stress of words, to a great extent, dealing, in this case, with syllables, not phonemes. This feature analysis of two texts belonging to different genres illustrates the word algorithm working.

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