Intonational Structure of neutral sentences in Brazilian Portuguese in the variety from Minas Gerais state

Abstract

This paper analyses the intonational structure of neutral declarative sentences of Brazilian Portuguese (BP) variety from Minas Gerais state, highlighting the influence of the number of syllables within prosodic words (PW), as well as of the prosodic word group (PWG) for the distribution of pitch accents (PAs). We analysed data from the variety of Minas Gerais, spoken in the Triângulo Mineiro, which was obtained in an experimentally controlled way, and analysed within the models of prosodic phonology and intonational phonology (Beckman; Pierrehumbert, 1986; Ladd, 1996, 2008; Selkirk, 1982, 1984, 1986; Nespor and Vogel, 1986). The results presented and analysed statistically show that the association of PA at the level of PW(G) in the internal position of the sentence is almost categorical. The analysis also showed that the number of syllables of PWs also play a relevant role in the high tonal density in this variety of BP, patterning similarly to the variety spoken in São Paulo state, as described in Vigário and Fernandes-Svartman (2010) and Fernandes-Svartman and Romano (2017).