This article discusses frequency effects in some Brazilian Portuguese phonological and morphological variations. The theoretical background adopted is the Network Model (Bybee 1985, 2001, 2010). Different linguistic phenomena are compared to analyze which linguistic processes affect the most or the least frequent words first. As a conclusion, it is observed that variations based on analogy seem to affect the least frequent words first, whereas phonetic reductions seem to affect the most frequent words first.
Frequency effects; Network Model; language variation and change
