O apêndice de comentário no português do Brasil: uma análise baseada em corpus

Abstract

This study is a corpus-based analysis of the information unit Appendix of Comment and aimed to establish a contrastive analysis of this unit in BP and Italian. This research is based on the Informational Patterning Theory (CRESTI, 2000), according to which an utterance is defined as the smallest unit possible of pragmatic interpretability. The boundaries between utterances and their internal units are delimited by intonation. One of the possible internal units is the information unit Appendix of Comment (APC), whose function is to establish a relation of integrationwith the illocutionary unit COM (CMM or COB). Research in Italian (Cresti, 2000, Tucci, 2006) and BP (Ulisses, 2008) showed that the APC has a flat and falling movement and F0 and intensity values lower than the average of the illocutionary unit to which it is integrated. This investigation was performed on a BP subcorpus consisting of 20 texts of the C-ORAL-BRASIL, of approximately 1,500 words each, and on an Italian subcorpus, also composed of the same number of texts, whichmake up the C-ORAL-ROM. The softwares WinPitch and Praat were used for the prosodic analyses and allowed us to identify and manipulate parameters of F0 and intensity, as well as to perform the synthesis in the process of verifying the APC and COB units.