As características prosódicas temporais da unidade informacional de Introdutor Locutivo

Abstract

Grounded in the premises of the Language into Act Theory (L-AcT), this dissertation constitutes a study of the textual informational unit known as the Locutive Introducer (INT), whose function is to indicate that the elements following it should be interpreted by the listener on a pragmatically different level from the rest of the utterance. The prosodic profile of the INT has no focus, but has a falling f0 at its end, with a fundamental frequency, intensity, and duration often lower than the rest of the utterance. The research aims to investigate the temporal prosodic characteristics of the INT, seeking, through a new methodology, to describe a formal aspect that may be crucial to convey its function and differentiate it from other units with greater accuracy. For the analyses, 58 excerpts of spontaneous speech were extracted from texts in the Minicorpus do Português Brasileiro Falado Informal, the Minicorpus Telefônico, and the Brazilian Gestual Corpus, all developed within the framework of the C-ORAL-BRASIL project. The dataset encompasses a wide diaphasic variation and is primarily representative of the Minas Gerais diatopy. The texts include orthographic transcription, prosodic segmentation, informational labeling, and alignment with sound files. The INTs and their respective adjacent contexts underwent manual annotations, aided by the Praat software, following parameters necessary for the research. Subsequently, aided by the RStudio interface, the data were automatically extracted and statistically treated. As a result, it was found that, besides having a high articulation rate, the impression of speed in the INT is also due to an increase in segmental reduction processes compared to its adjacent contexts. It was also found that the larger the INT, the lower the articulation rate and the proportion of syllable elision in the informational unit. Furthermore, as a result, it was observed that the most frequently used words in the INT are two-syllable oxytones, mainly the verb falar (to speak) and the adverb assim (like this), unlike the contexts adjacent to the unit, where paroxytones are more frequent.