Influências prosódicas nos encontros vocálicos em fronteira de palavras

Abstract

This work aims at studying the prosodic influences on external sandhi processes from the hypothesis which claims that even if there is no structural restriction the expected realizations of elision, degemination and diphthongization still do not occur due to the influence of someprosodic elements such as pause, lengthening and emphasis. In the theoretical background a description of the occurrences and restrictions on the external sandhi processes is presented as well as a review on intonation, prosody and analysis parameters. To test the hypothesis and to verify the objective the corpus of POBH (The Sound Pattern of Brazilian Portuguese of Belo Horizonte), proposed by Magalhães (2000), was used. The analyzed four subjects generate 3641 examples which comprise propitious contexts for the realization of elision, degemination and diphthongization. Contrary to what is theoretically expected, 3171 contexts of non-occurrences - due to some elements of speech - and only 470 occurrences of the external sandhi were found. Byusing the software Microsoft Excel, version 2003 and Minitab 15 the data were statistically analyzed. The Praat software, version 5.0.0.2, was used to analyze duration, the minimum and maximum fundamental frequency and the melodic variation. It was possible to conclude that therelation between the F0 and melodic variation values range according to the quality of the vowels, the external sandhi processes and the occurrence or non-occurrence of these processes.As to the duration, the values are higher in the non-occurrence of elision and diphthongization than in the occurrence of these processes. In regard to the degemination, what happens is exactly the opposite: the duration is higher in the occurrence than in the non-occurrence of the sandhi processes.