Prosodic and Musical Prominence in Portuguese Folk Verse

The paper focus on the correspondence between prosodic and musical prominence in Portuguese folk verse. On the basis of the exhaustive analysis of a collection of Portuguese traditional songs, the match between metric prominence (primary and secondary word-stress) and musical prominence (musical bars’ strong beats) will be examined. Unsurprisingly, a clear correlation between main stress and strong musical beats was found. As for the secondary word-stress, though, no evidence correlating the distribution of secondary word-stress with musical prominence was identified.