Some notes on prosodic phrasing and tonal density in Portuguese of Mozambique

Abstract

This paper brings a preliminary investigation on the prosodic phrasing of neutral declarative phrases and its tonal density, in the Portuguese spoken in Mozambique, Africa, in spontaneous speech. It is, therefore, important to describe the melodic marks of the IP boundaries: the types of pitch accents and boundary tones, and the occurrence of silent pauses. The study makes use of the theoretical and methodological apparatus of the Prosodic Phonology and the Autosegmental Metrical Intonational Phonology; the acoustic-experimental analysis as well as the intonational notation are realized in the speech analysis software Praat. The data comes from the speech of a young woman, with a university degree, who is a native speaker of Portuguese. In relation to the aspects of the prosodic phrasing, the results found indicate that H+L*L% is the most frequent melodic contour in final IPs (60%). In non-final IPs, this contour occurs in 35% of the data, followed by L+H*H%, representing 25%. A matching between the most frequent initial pitch accent and nuclear contour – L+H*_H+L*L% -- indicated that 32,5% of IPs of the sample (80) were produced with this melodic pattern. The pause was present in 68,3% of the boundaries of non-final IPs (41/60 tokens) and in 80% of final IPs (16/20 tokens). Concerning the tonal density, we observed a percentage of 43,2% (70/162) of presence of pitch accents in the stressed syllables of the PWs in internal position of the IPs, in the spontaneous speech of the mozambican speaker.