Prosodic characteristics of nouns and phrases in Brazilian Portuguese

• Grant number: 23/02191-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research
• Start date: January 10, 2024
• End date: July 09, 2024
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics - Linguistic Theory and Analysis
• Principal Investigator: Raquel Santana Santos
• Grantee: Raquel Santana Santos
• Host Investigator: Gorka Elordieta
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Universidad del País Vasco, Álava (UPV), Spain

Abstract

The aim of this project is to discuss the prosodic behavior of compound nouns in Brazilian Portuguese. Due to prosodic mapping, domains of different grammatical components are not necessarily isomorphic. For example, the word sozinho is considered 1 word for morphology, 1 word for syntax, but 2 words for phonology, while in solitário we consider 1 word in the three domains; in guarda-chuva we have 1 word for morphology and syntax, but 3 for phonology. Much remains to be discussed within these created domains, including the issue of compound nouns. There are morphosyntactic compounds, with a dominance relationship between the words (guarda-roupa) - and in this case, the position of the nucleus can be on the right or on the left, which generates different mappings ([menina][boa] vs. [boa menina] ]). There are also morphological compounds (as in vice-rei, afro-americano), which may have different dominance relationships, and about which there is still much debate in terms of prosodic mapping. And finally, there are compounds, such as proper names (José Maria) in which there is no morphological or syntactic dominance relationship. This objective unfolds on three morphosyntactic fronts: (i) On the one hand, to analyze whether sequences of compound nouns (which are considered as 1 single syntactic phrase, but 2 prosodic phrases) have a similar or different behavior to syntactic sequences formed by Noun + Adjective (which are analyzed in the linguistic literature as forming 2 syntactic phrases and 2 prosodic phrases); (ii) compare the different types of compound nouns: those that show a structural dominance relationship between words with those that do not (iii) observe whether the position of the head affects the results in the case of compounds with head-complement. As null working hypotheses, we expect the following behaviors: 1) Compound nouns with structural dominance will have the same behavior as phrases, as they share the characteristic of a syntactic structure: (i) if the head is on the left and the complement on the right (on the recursive side), they will form two prosodic units;(ii) if the head is on the right and the complement on the left (on the non-recursive side), they form a single prosodic unit with their head; 2) Compound names without structural dominance (like proper names): if we assume that the default is to have a structure, then these names would deviate from the default pattern. (i) if they follow the syntactic structure, they are expected to behave like (ii) above.(ii) however, it is not clear whether the structure to be followed is morphological, since the nucleus can be found either on the left or on the right. For the diagnosis, we will verify the application of five phonological processes that vary according to the domain of application: stress retraction (which occurs only within a phonological phrase), diphthongization and degemination (which occur within and between words), elision (which only occurs between words) and lengthening (which may vary depending on the prosodic level at which it occurs - the higher the prosodic level, the longer the syllable is produced).The results will allow us to shed more light on the issue of what is universal and what is specific to the language, will give us more subsidies for understanding processes occuring in the acquisition of 1st and 2nd languages, and for speech therapy intervention. (AU)