São Paulo School of Advanced Studies in Speech Dynamics

This presentation discusses some facts of Brazilian Portuguese (henceforth BP)
phonology which can contribute to the ongoing discussion on the use of dynamic
models in phonological theory. The focus is, however, on description, not modeling, of
such facts.

The study of the diversity of sound systems of natural languages presents many challenges. On the
one hand, one must collect as much data as possible on the observed phenomena in the languages of
the world. On the other, these data must be acquired with reliable measuring devices in order to be
reliably quantified.

I here intend to show the relevance of studies of animal communication and the importance of a
comparative approach for the understanding of language and of its evolution. Uniqueness or speechis-
special hypotheses are not incompatible with the search for analogous or convergent features…

Comprehension of the mechanisms that underlie the production of speech is, progressively, becoming deeper and wider, thanks to the development of knowledge in areas such as acoustics, dynamics, motor
control, neurophysiology and human physiology in general…

Formal linguistic models, such as those based on generative assumptions, have difficulties in
explaining language variability and change which are inherent to all languages. The main
problem arises due to the nature of linguistic representations which are understood as
categorical…

This talk will report a detailed statistical analysis of the temporal distribution of words over times much longer
than sentence length. Inspiration for our work [1] comes from Zipf’s discovery [2, 3] that word frequency distributions obey a power law…