Contributions of the study on detachment in the spoken language for the description of prosodic phrasing in Brazilian Portuguese

Abstract

The detachment was postulated by Decat (1999, 2011), based on a functional-discursive analysis. The author states that some subordinate clauses can occur separated of the main clause or totally alone. Instigated by the phenomenon, this paper performs a prosodic description of detachment clauses  and correlates it with reflections about prosodic phrasing in Brazilian Portuguese (BP). For this, it takes into account the results of Tenani (2002) and Serra (2009), about the intonational structure of adverbial sentences and the acoustic correlates of the prosodic phrasing in BP, respectively. These works reveals that the intonational contour L + H * H% is correlated with hierarchical intonational phrases (IPs) and the pause is the most robust clue in IP phrasing. Duration, pause and F0 contour were the acoustic parameters analyzed in 900 adverbial sentences - 450 attached to the matrix clause and another 450 detached, lexicaly identical, produced by five subjects from Rio de Janeiro. The results demonstrates that most of the adverbial clauses produced together with the matrix  were limited by melodic contours with a low boundary ( 72,7% of data - 38,5% of L+H*L% and 34,2% of H+L*L%), whereas the contour L + H * H% was present only in 27,3% of data.  In the other hand, detached clauses, which are complete, the melodic contour L + H * H% was produced majority(83,5%). Thus, it is postulated that the contour L + H * H%, referred to as "continuation" in prosody-based literature (Gonçalves 1997; Cunha, 2000; Tenani 2002) would only bring the idea of ​​continuity when the IP is phrased without another prominent prosodic clue.