O comportamento melódico das sentenças declarativas e interrogativas na fala de Manaus (AM)

Abstract

The present study has as main objective to analyze, in prosodic terms, the intonational behavior of different structures of the lexical accent in different tonal positions. As a study linked to the Atlas Prosodic Multimedia Project of the North Portuguese of Brazil (AMPER-POR), which in turn is linked to the Atlas Multimedia Project Prosodique de l'Espace Roman (AMPER), we have selected for it the corpus already constituted in the AMPER-POR. Field research was carried out in the city of Manaus, in the State of Amazonas, and all methodological procedures covered those already instituted by the project in question. We used 396 phrases where we observed, in the different accent positions, the melodic chains of fundamental frequency, duration and intensity to identify the prosodic sequences of the phrases. The interviews were carried out spontaneously in four informants, one couple with a complete upper level and one with a low level of schooling. From the corpus collected through recording we analyzed simple phrasal structures, but evidencing all possible types of lexical accentuation of Portuguese (oxytone, paroxitone and proparoxytone). The results showed that, with a general incidence of Brazilian Portuguese, in the nuclear position, in the total declarative modality, the flow at the beginning is low, showing a frequency uptake of the tonic syllable and subsequent lowering in the post-tonic syllable. In the total interrogative modality, in contrast to the declarative one, the data showed that the flow at the beginning happens from a raised frequency followed by a decline and again an increase in the post-tonic position. Regarding duration, we did not observe distinctive values between the declarative and interrogative phrase, but we observed that in the interrogative phrase it obtained measures of longer duration. Regarding the intensity, the interrogatives showed a greater energy than the declaratives. It was evident that both intensity and duration are not relevant factors for distinguishing between declarative, total interrogatives in the city of Manaus.