Intomation of cleft sentences in Brazilian Portuguese and the syntax-phonology interface

Abstract

This study, developed within the theoretical framework of Intonational Phonology (cf. Pierrehumbert, 1980; Beckman and Pierrehumbert, 1986; Ladd 1996; Jun, 2005), is a comparative study of the intonational structure of neutral and cleft sentences (cleft, inverted cleft, and reduced inverted cleft sentences) in Brazilian Portuguese (hereafter PB). According to results obtained by Frota (1994), Vigário (1998) and Fernandes-Svartman (2007c), in special syntactic structures in European Portuguese, the intonational contour undergoes local, and sometimes global alteration, compared to the contour of neutral sentences. Our hypothesis is that alteration in the intonational contour in special syntactic structures also occurs in PB, as is the case with cleft sentences. The results attained by this study confirm this hypothesis, to the extent that significant differences between the intonational contour of neutral sentences and the intonational contour of cleft sentences in PB were found. While neutral sentences showed tonal accents associated with practically each prosodic word of the sentence, and an absence of phrasal accents associated with boundaries of phonological phrases, cleft sentences showed: (i) tonal accent obligatorily associated with the head prosodic word of the phonological phrase in which the focused subject is mapped; (ii) phrasal accent optionally associated with the right boundary of this same phonological phrase; and (iii) absence of tonal accents associated with intermediary prosodic words (between the head prosodic word of the phonological phrase in which the focused subject is mapped and the head prosodic word of the last phonological of the intonational phrase). In the case of the cleft sentences, the presence of a phrasal accent associated with the right boundary of the phonological phrase in which the focused subject is mapped may, theoretically, be related to the codification of a special syntactic position occupied by this subject in such structures: outside the IP, in the CP specifier position.