VOS sentences in European Portuguese: p-movement and intonational structure

Abstract

This paper aims to analyze the syntactic and intonational structures associated with VOS sentences (sentences in verb-object-subject order) in European Portuguese (henceforth EP), with the hypothesis that prosody (reflected in intonational structure) can encode the syntactic structure associated with EP neutral sentences (sentences SVO – in subject-verb-object order) and the syntactic structure associated with EP VOS sentences in different ways. This hypothesis is based on the experimental results presented in Frota (1994), which reveal that the intonational contour associated with special syntactic structures of EP is affected locally (or even whole) in relation to the neutral contour. For the investigation of that hypothesis, the intonational and syntactic structures associated with EP SVO neutral sentences and with EP VOS sentences are comparatively analyzed. For the syntactic analysis of the latter type of sentences, syntactic and prosodic arguments are brought in favor of the derivation proposed by Fernandes (2007), by p-movement (Zubizarreta, 1998) of the object. Regarding the analysis of the intonational structure of EP VOS sentences, based on the results of Fernandes (2007), the initial hypothesis of this study is confirmed, since that the intonational structure associated with EP VOS sentences is different from the intonational structure associated with SVO neutral sentences of the same variety of Portuguese. Unlike the intonational structure of SVO neutral sentences, in the intonational structure of EP VOS sentences there are more pitch accents and also a specific pitch accent (L*+H) associated with the object moved from the right edge of the sentence, according to the syntactic derivation proposed in this paper.