Correlates of Rhythm in Written Texts of Brazilian and European Portuguese

We address the question of detecting fingerprints of rhythm in written texts. We study texts from 20th century Brazilian and Portuguese authors. In these texts we codify the syllables according to whether they carry main stress or not, and whether they are at the beginning of a phonological word or not. Additionally, periods are also marked. Modeling the sequences of symbols obtained with this codification as Variable Length Markov Chains, we estimate the patterns for each text. This probabilistic model discriminates European Portuguese from Brazilian Portuguese. Moreover, the model obtained for each language has a clear linguistic interpretation, as it captures structural features which have long been conjectured in the literature.address the question of detecting fingerprints of rhythm in written texts. We study texts from 20th century Brazilian and Portuguese authors. In these texts we codify the syllables according to whether they carry main stress or not, and whether they are at the beginning of a phonological word or not. Additionally, periods are also marked. Modeling the sequences of symbols obtained with this codification as Variable Length Markov Chains, we estimate the patterns for each text. This probabilistic model discriminates European Portuguese from Brazilian Portuguese. Moreover, the model obtained for each language has a clear linguistic interpretation, as it captures structural features which have long been conjectured in the literature.