The intonation of Standard and Northern European Portuguese: A comparative intonational phonology approach

Abstract

It has been generally thought that Northern varieties of European Portuguese (EP) are more conservative than Standard (Lisbon) EP, and show some similarity with Spanish. However, the intonation of the different varieties of EP has not attracted the attention of phonologists or phoneticians until very recently. This work has two main goals: (i) to characterise the differences between Northern and Standard EP by offering a first account of the intonational system of Northern dialects; (ii) to add to the understanding of intonational variation within Ibero-Romance languages and language varieties. It is shown that the two varieties resort to different nuclear accents in declaratives, wh-questions and yes-no questions. Realisational, phonotactic and semantic differences are also found. Both the facts of pitch accent distribution and the intonational phrasing choices displayed suggest that Standard EP has innovated from Northern EP and Spanish by reducing phrase-internal pitch accents and producing larger major prosodic phrases.

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