| Summary: | This paper contends that the two competing "rules" that the literature on Portuguese morphophonology has claimed to apply to the verb paradigm, namely, vowel height harmony and vowel lowering, are, in fact, phonotactic restrictions that apply, in a categorical fashion, to the inflected verb stem and, in a gradient fashion, to the non-inflected verb stem. At least in Brazilian Portuguese, the non-inflected verb stem is consistent with the inflected verb stem in that lowering predominates in both in the first conjugation and harmony predominates in both in the second and third conjugation. Lowering is in turn consistent with other versions of OCP which cut across all grammatical categories. The findings are interpreted in light of Acoustic-Articulatory Phonology (Albano 2001), which predicts, on grounds of facilitation of decoding of acoustic-to-articulatory relations, that stress tends to attract low vowels except where vowel quality is otherwise predictable.
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