Stress assignment of -mente adverbs in Portuguese: discussion of prosodic and rhythmic aspects

Abstract

This article aims to present a discussion about the prosodic behavior of adverbs in -mente in Archaic Portuguese (AP) and Brazilian Portuguese (BP) under the Prosodic and Metrical Phonology bias. For the description of the prosodic status of these adverbs, especially in AP, a corpus composed of 420 cantigas [a genre of poetry] in praise of the Virgin Mary, known as Cantigas de Santa Maria (CSM), and 1251 secular cantigas (510 cantigas de amigo, 431 cantigas de escárnio e maldizer and 310 cantigas de amor). On the other hand, a part of the database from “Corpus Online do Português” [Online Corpus of the Portuguese Language], prepared jointly by researchers Michael Ferreira, from Georgetown University, and Mark Davies, from Brigham Young University, was elected as study corpus of the BP. From the collection and analysis of the adverbial forms ending in -mente in the corpora, it has been concluded that, from the prosodic perspective, the adverbial forms ending in -mente are compounds (one lexical stress and one secondary stress) in both AP and BP, since such adverbs may be considered elements formed of independent parts among themselves, where the Stress Assignment Rule operates in different domains: in bases already inflected and in the “suffix” ending in -mente.