Tune or text? Tune-text accommodation strategies in Portuguese

Abstract

In Portuguese, different strategies for dealing with tune-text accommodation have been reported. However, no systematic research has been conducted exploring crucial cases of complex nuclear melodies realized in nuclear words with final stress, as in yes-no questions. Based on reading and semispontaneous data from ten regions in Brazil and eleven regions in Portugal, this study reveals that Brazilian and European Portuguese globally differ with respect to the strategies implemented: in Brazilian Portuguese, the text is preserved and the melody is changed (mostly by means of tonal truncation); in European Portuguese, the melody is preserved and the text is changed through various strategies, including schwa epenthesis. Faithfulness to the text or to the tune is thus a relevant dimension of variation both across and within languages, and text changes (through vowel lengthening, vowel split, vowel epenthesis, or blocking of vowel deletion) are crucial means to support tune realization that have recently been found in unrelated languages.

Word final schwa is driven by intonation—The case of Bari Italian

“…Frota (2002) points out that schwa is inserted as one of a number of accommodation strategies when the final syllable in the phrase bears a nuclear accent and ends in a sonorant. In Frota et al (2016), a corpus study showed that schwa insertion (referred to as epenthesis) is found in yes-no questions not only in Lisbon, but also in the centre-southern interior regions, albeit only 17% of the time.…”

“…Importantly for the present study is that this schwa can be inserted phase finally after the final lexical consonant. Frota (2002Frota ( , 2014Frota ( , 2016 and Frota et al (2015) report on similar insertions of non-lexical vowels after sonorants in the standard variety of European Portuguese: A high central vowel is inserted after the phrase-final lexical syllable -again, as in the lengthening cases above -if there is a complex tonal movement, in this case a fall-rise. Hellmuth (2016) also reports the insertion of schwa in Tunisian Arabic, again in conjunction with a complex tonal movement, in this case a rise-fall, in the intonation contour used in questions.…”

Visual and auditory cues of assertions and questions in brazilian portuguese and Mexican Spanishy

“…The phonological notation of the nuclear region of the assertive and interrogative intonational contours was made following the Autossegmental-Metric model (Pierrehumbert, 1980). Sp_ToBI (Prieto and Roseano, 2018) was used for analyzing MS data and Portuguese_ToBI (Frota et al, 2015b) for BP as well as descriptions provided by Frota et al (2015a) and Moraes (1998Moraes ( , 2008. Results of the acoustic description are presented in section 3.1 of this article.…”

The tune drives the text

“…In Standard European Portuguese, in words with penultimate stress, word-final schwa deletion may be blocked in intonation-phrase final position under falling-rising contour characteristic of polar questions (Frota et al 2015b(Frota et al , 2016Vigário, 2016). This is an interesting case because in this variety of Portuguese, word-final schwa deletion has been described as mandatory, but as regularly failing to apply in intonation phrase-final position in certain tonal contexts.…”