The primary goal of the project is to model up the relationship between prosody and syntax in the process of language change which led from Classical Portuguese to Modern European Portuguese. Beyond the specific results of the linguistic and mathematical research which will be developed within this project, it will also produce :

• The Tycho Brahe Parsed Corpus of Historical Portuguese, consisting of texts written by Portuguese authors born between 1550 and 1850.
• a Comparative Tagged Corpus of Spoken Modern European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese, consisting of categorized recorded registers from speakers of both dialects.

Supported by FAPESP grant n. 98/3382-0 (Projeto Temático Rhythmic patterns, parameter setting and language change )
Additional support provided by PRONEX grant 66.2177/1996-6 (Núcleo de Excelência Critical phenomena in probability and stochastic processes) and CNPq grant 465928/2000-5 ( Probabilistic tools for pattern identification applied to linguistics)