Tonal association in neutral and subject-narrow-focus sentences in Brazilian Portuguese: a comparison with European Portuguese

Abstract

This paper presents a comparative description and analysis of the intonational contours of Brazilian Portuguese (BP) sentences in neutral and subject-narrow-focus conditions. Making use of the literature on European Portuguese (EP) intonation, it also compares BP intonation with the intonation of EP sentences under the same conditions, looking for similarities and differences between the intonational patterns of these two Portuguese varieties. Our results indicate that BP neutral sentences can optionally show pitch accents associated with all prosodic words (ωs). In subject-narrow- focus conditions, the same type of pitch accents that are found associated with non-focused subjects can also be found with focused subjects. In addition, it is also possible to find a phrasal accent associated with the right boundary of the phonological phrase (φ) that contains the focused subject. In contrast to BP, in EP neutral sentences, pitch accents are associated with the I-initial and I-final ωs. Furthermore, in this variety, in subject-narrow-focus conditions there is always a special bitonal pitch accent carried by the focused subject and there are no phrasal accents associated with boundaries of the φ that contains the subject.

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