Prosodic aspects of Portuguese of Guinea-Bissau: neutral contour intonation

Author(s)

Vinícius Gonçalves dos Santos

• Document type: Master's Dissertation
• Press: São Paulo.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH/SBD)
• Defense date: 2015-02-03

Examining board members

Flaviane Romani Fernandes Svartman; Gabriel Antunes de Araujo; Luciani Ester Tenani

• Advisor: Flaviane Romani Fernandes Svartman

Abstract

In this study, we investigate the intonation of neutral declarative sentences of Portuguese of Guinea-Bissau (GBP), with regarding to the investigation of the relation between tonal events assignment and prosodic domains formation. In addition, we compare the results obtained for the analysis of GBP data with the intonational patterns of neutral sentences described on previous works for Brazilian Portuguese (BP) and European Portuguese (EP). For this research, a corpus of two different speech styles (read sentences and spontaneous speech sentences) was used. For the description and analysis of intonational of neutral declarative sentences in this corpus we followed the Autosegmental Metrical aproach within the intonational phonology framework (PIERREHUMBERT, 1980; BECKMAN; PIERREHUMBERT, 1986; LADD, 1996, 2008; among others), the Prosodic Phonology framework (SELKIRK, 1984, 1986, 2000; NESPOR; VOGEL 1986, 2007; among others) and previous studies conducted on those theoretical frameworks and applied to BP (CUNHA; 2000; FROTA; VIGÁRIO, 2000; TENANI 2002; FERNANDES, 2007a, 2007b; SERRA 2009; among others) and EP (GRØNNUM; VIANA, 1999; FROTA, 2000, 2002a, 2002b, 2003; VIGÁRIO, 2003; FROTA; VIGÁRIO, 2003; CRUZ, 2013; among others). The results achieved in this work show that the intonation properties of GBP are similar to those found in the other varieties of Portuguese already studied. These properties are as follow: (i) frequent association of pitch accents with Phonological Words of intonation contour (tonal characteristic also found in BP); (ii) a pitch accent is obligatorily associated with the Phonological Word head of the last Phonological Phrase of a Intonation Phrase, followed by a boundary tone associated with the right edge of that Intonation Phrase (as in BP and EP); (iii) there is a matching in the nuclear contour of GPB neutral declarative sentences with the nuclear contour of BP and varieties of EP neutral declarative sentences; (iv) the possibility of phrasal accents to be associated with phonological phrases boundaries (the same possibility is found for one of the center-southern varieties of EP); and (v) the possibility of H tones to be associated with pretonic syllables of long Prosodic Words (as in BP). (AU)

• FAPESP's process: 13/08329-1 - Neutral Intonation Contour in Guinea-Bissau Portuguese
• Grantee: Vinícius Gonçalves dos Santos
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master