The intonational pattern of interrogative sentences of the Paulista variety of Brazilian Portuguese

Author(s)

Carolina Carbonari Rosignoli

• 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: 2017-06-26

Examining board members

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

• Advisor: Flaviane Romani Fernandes Svartman

Abstract

This study aims to describe the intonational contour of global and partial, neutral and non-neutral interrogative sentences of the Paulista variety of Brazilian Portuguese (BP). We investigate the relation between tonal events assignment and the formation of prosodic domains. Our goal is to find intonational patterns that codigy pragmatic meaning of different clause types of BP interrogative sentences. Our hypothesis is that the total contour has a fundamental role in codifying pragmatic meaning, besides the nuclear contour. In our work, the corpora analyzed includes controlled speech data obtained in a reading task that exposed interrogative sentences along with context to elicit the production of interrogatives with different pragmatic meanings and semicontrolled speech data recorded in a map task. The description and the prosodic analysis of the intonational phrasing of the interrogative sentences of our corpora were developed according to an integrated view of the Autossegmental Metrical approach within the framework of Intonational Phonology (Pierrehumbert 1980; Pierrehumbert & Beckman 1988; Ladd 1996, 2008; Jun 2005/2014; entre outros) and the Prosodic Phonology framework (Selkirk 1984, 1986, 2000; Nespor & Vogel 1986, 2007). Our analysis take into account previous works developed in this same framework and applied to Portuguese (Frota & Vigário 2000; Tenani 2002; Fernandes 2007a, 2007b, Serra 2009, Toneli 2014; and, more specifically regarding interrogative sentences, Moraes 2008, Truckenbrodt, Sandalo & Abaurre 2009, Castelo 2011, 2016 e Frota et. al. 2015a). The results achieved through this investigation reveal that (i) in general, the nuclear contour of interrogative sentences of the Paulista variety of BP show a rising-falling pattern; (ii) the total contour plays an important role in conveying pragmatic meaning of questions; (iii) there are special prosodic characteristics assigned to the total contour that correspond to specific pragmatic meaning, such as: (a) focus and emphasis marking that varies depending on the pragmatic meaning associated with different phrase types; (b) downstep association to the nuclear contour in neutral interrogative sentences; (c) upstep association to the emphatic element in counter expectation sentences; (d) lower tessiture of the range of variation in the portion of the intonational contour corresponding to the first prosodic word and the nuclear contour in rhetoric questions; (e) differences in tonal density between neutral and non-neutral sentences; among other prosodic characteristics associated with specific pragmatic meaning. These results confirm lead us to achieve our objectives and confirm our main hypothesis. (AU)

• FAPESP's process: 15/07257-2 - The prosody of interrogative sentences of paulista dialect of Brazilian Portuguese: an analysis of production and perception
• Grantee: Carolina Carbonari Rosignoli
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master