A comparative study on high pre-tonic pitch accents between a Brazilian Portuguese and an Italian variety: a case of supra-segmental reanalysis. Marco Barone 1,2 1 Departamento de Matemática, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Recife, Brazil 2 Departament de Traducció i Ciències del Llenguatge, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain marco@dmat.ufpe.br Abstract In this paper we posit the reanalysis of the high trailing tone of a pre-nuclear pitch accent spreading to the right as the leading tone of a nuclear pitch accent, in the Brazilian Portuguese variety of Recife. In order to do this, we make a comparative study with another Romance variety presenting the same pattern, where the underlying phrasing structure is preserved and reanalysis does not take place. Index Terms: prosody, intonation, intonation change, Brazilian Portuguese, high pre-tonic peak, tone spreading, reanalysis. 1. Introduction Reanalysis has often been observed to be a powerful trigger of language change: in syntax it has been defined as a mechanism which changes the underlying structure of a syntactic pattern and which does not involve any immediate or intrinsic modification of its surface manifestation [1: 61]. In phonological terms, it may be thought of as a silent shift of the same phonetic form from one corresponding category to another, across a discrete boundary. Although silent, reanalysis is bound to surface when further changes take place. 300 250 0 0.5 Acho que eu vou pra Recife a ʃə ku vo pɾæ he si fə H* H* H+L* L% Fig. 1 The high pre-tonic pattern in Recife Portuguese 0 0.5 1 175 150 125 100 75 2. The case study The intonation of Brazilian Portuguese spoken in the North East of Brazil displays a salient pattern on declarative sentences, formed by a salient rise on the pre-tonic and a fall on the tonic nuclear syllable (see Fig. 1). Within the ToBI system ([2]), it was labelled as H+L* and authors have seen it as an indicator of narrow non-contrastive focus ([3], [4]). The same pattern was found in a recent documentation of the Italian variety of Pescara ([5], [6]) which made use of the Discourse Completion Task methodology ([7]), including SVO declarative sentences (see Fig. 2). The high pre-tonic contour was the pattern of non-contrastive narrow focus statements but it was also widely present on broad focus statements, due a transfer from local vernacular, and another similar study was set, for Pescara Romance Vernacular ([8]). It was concluded the Pescara Italian intonation contains a subsystem, transferred from vernacular, where a prosodic focus marking on the nucleus is mandatory, in the sense of ([9]), that is, not necessarily corresponding to an informational focus value. Beve una bibita. be ve u na b:i b:i ta H+L* Fig. 2 The high pre-tonic pattern in Pescara Italian LL% However, in all SVO sentences of the Discourse Completion Task, the object contained just one tone bearing unit, coinciding with the nucleus. A further study on SVO declaratives with compound object phrases has disentangled the real nature of this pattern, which is actually formed by a rising accent on the first syllable of the object and a falling one on the its last (nuclear) syllable, connected by a high plateau, to form a hat pattern (see Fig. 3). When the first and last syllable of the object coincide, in order to avoid crash, the rising accent is anticipated to the pre-nuclear syllable, causing the salient pre-tonic rise (Table 1). In Pescara Italian occurrences are found of broad focus declaratives with
compound objects, uttered without a vernacular-like intonation: the rising accent is absent, the nuclear accent is a shallow fall from baseline (L* or H+L*) and in no case it is possible to have a pre-tonic rise. This has revealed that the pre-tonic rise is actually a hat pattern of length zero and it is more correctly analyzed as the trace of a right spreading high pre-nuclear trailing target, than as the leading tone of a nuclear H+L* accent. The author has then set up a study on declaratives with compound object, in the Portuguese variety of Recife, to check whether the same behaviour would be observed there and understand whether, also in Recife, the high pre-tonic target is actually a leading tone or part of a hat pattern of length zero. 0 0.5 1 1.5 164 128 92 56 20 Maria beve una tazza di latte. ma ria be veu na ta ts:a di la t:e L+H*L- L+H* H+L* L-L% Fig 3. The hat pattern in Pescara their stressed positions (ranging from zero to five syllables). The language used is informal and contains young slang. 3.3. Procedure For each target sentence, speakers were shown and asked to learn it, then two researchers (one being from Recife) started acting a situation that at some point would require he speaker to enter the conversation and utter the target sentence. Examples: Researcher: Vixe, que confusão, tudo jogado pro ar, nem que tenha passado um furacão. My god, what a mess, looks like a hurricane came trough Speaker: Tu devia ter visto a casa de Vanessa! You should have seen Vanessa s place Situations were presented so that the speaker could utter the target sentence as an out-of the blue statement, with no need of informational focus on the object. 4. Results Results show that in Recife SVO statements with compound object constituent it is possible: 1) to have no prominence at all and just a medium-tolow fall in the nuclear accent, as in Pescara Italian 2) to have a hat pattern on the object constituent, similarly to Pescara Italian 3) to have a rise on the pre-tonic nuclear syllable, which is never found in Pescara Italian. The table below shows the two possible patterns and Fig. 4 in the following page show what the case 3) looks like. Table 1. The hat pattern and its implementation as a pre-tonic rise 3.1. Participants 3. Methodology Seven speakers from the metropolitan area of Recife, three male and four female, ranging from 23 to 31 year old, participated in the study. They all have complete high scholl education, have mostly lived in Recife and their parents are originary from Recife too. Finally, Table 2 contains quantitative data on the use of the two kinds of prominence, divided by gender. 3.2. Materials A list of 23 SVO statements was prepared: in four of them the object is a simple noun phrase and in 19 statements the object is a compound nuclear phrase with various syntactic structure (from compound words to simple head-modifier types, to objects with embedded clause modifiers), number of tone bearing units (two or three) and variable distance between
0 0.5 1 1.5 2 2.5 3 3.5 4 4.5 350 290 230 170 110 50 Esse ano to lisa demais pra sair do Brasil, eu acho que eu vou pro Rio de Janeiro es seã no to li za di mai pra sa ido bra ziu eu a ʃkou vou pɾøxiu di Ʒa nei ru L+H* H+L* LL% L+!H*L+!H*L+!H* H+L* LL% Fig. 4 The high pre-tonic pattern with a compound object in Recife Portuguese. Simple phrase Compound phrase MALE H+L*(pre-tonic rise) 10 34 L+H* H+L* (hat pattern) 57 H+L* (without high pre-tonic) 5 10 Other 2 5 Total marked contours /Total (M) 10/17 (59%) 91/106 (86%) Total Upstep/Total marked contours (M) 34/91 (37%) FEMALE H+L*(pre-tonic rise) 23 94 L+H* H+L* (hat pattern) 25 H+L* (without high pre-tonic) 12 Other 1 11 Total marked contours /Total (F) 23/24 (96%) 119/142 (83%) Total Upstep/Total marked contours (F) 94/119 (79%) TOTAL H+L*(pre-tonic rise) 33 128 (MALE + L+H* H+L* (hat pattern) 82 FEMALE) H+L* (without high pre-tonic) 5 22 Other 3 16 Total marked contours /Total (T) 33/41 (80%) 210/248 (85%) Total Upstep/Total marked contours (T) 128/210 (61%) Table 2 The proportion of pre-tonic rise and hat pattern on Recife Portuguese statements
5. Discussion and conclusion Table 2 shows that not only is the pre-tonic rise is allowed in Recife, unlike Pescara, for statements with a compound object, but that it is also the overall prevailing pattern (61%: 79% in women and 37% in men). Surprisingly, the gender parameter has appeared to heavily influence the use of this pattern. In language change theory young women are often the social group that is most likely to lead change, the result may be interpreted in the light of a possible reanalysis of the pre-tonic rise found in statements with simple object, which are the most common and the most used by far. The prosodic cohesion marked by the hat patterns on compound objects would no longer be recognized, according to the following scheme: 1)Vou para [[Recife] N ] F I m going to Recife 2)Vou para [o Rio [de Janeiro] N ] F I m going to Rio de Janeiro where N stands for nucleus and F is the cohese phrase that may receive prosodic focus. The type 1) example is by far the most found and used in daily speech and the perception of a double boundary may have been forgotten, reflecting in a reinterpretation as: 1) Vou para [Recife] N,F which surfaces in compound object sentences as: 2) Vou para o Rio [de Janeiro] N,F The prosodic prominence is moved on the bare nucleus, showing that this could not correspond to an informational focus. In order to be sure of the historical evolution of the reanalysis posited, a further diachronic study is needed, considering different age group of Recife female speakers.
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