Características prosódicas do tópico em PE e o uso do pronome lembrete

Abstract

This corpora-based study analyses two aspects of the informational unit of Topic: the identification of intonational forms of the Topic unit in EP and the relationship between the informational unit of topic and the resumption by resumptive pronoun in BP. The research was conducted following the Theory of Language in Act, which claims that the utterance is the smallest unit that can be pragmatically interpreted, namely, a speech act. The boundaries between the utterances and its internal units are delimited by intonation. One of the possible internal units is the informational unit of Topic, which establishes the scope of the utterances illocutionary force. The illocution is realised in a unit called Comment, which exists in every utterance. Studies show that the Topic can be realised according to four intonational forms. This study was conducted in a BP subcorpus with 20 C-ORAL-BRASIL texts of approximately 1.500 words each, and in a EP subcorpus of 5 C-ORAL-ROM texts of the same dimensions. For the prosodic analysis, the programs used were WinPitch and Praat, which allow the user to identify and handle some parameters such as the F0 movements,duration and intensity. In the EP subcorpus, it was identified 72 informational units of Topic, distributed among the four intonational forms mentioned above, but presented with new variants. The most frequent intonational form in EP seems to be of type 4, found in BP as welland nonexistent in Italian. The type 3 form is frequent in Italian and used in BP, but rare in EP. This data, which have to be verified in larger scale corpora, contributes significantly to understand the tendencies of BP intonational forms usage. Regarding the resumptive pronoun, the BP subcorpus analysis has shown that this type of pronominal resumption only occurs in the Topic-Comment structure, resuming in the Comment a noun phrase from the Topic. Thus, the resumption by resumptive pronoun is subject to prosodic and informational restrictions.The majority of the occurrences are related to the resumption of the sentences subject in the Comment unit, which leads to the conclusion that it is used to fulfil the syntactic function of the subject of the Comment unit. It was also ascertained that the use of the resumptive pronoun is not a major strategy in BP. Resumptive pronouns were not found in the EPsubcorpus.