RELATIVE CLAUSES IN BRAZILIAN PORTUGUESE SPONTANEOUS SPEECH: AN EXPLORATORY STUDY BASED ON THE C-ORAL-BRASIL CORPUS

Abstract

This paper systematizes the results found in an exploratory study about relative clauses found in an informationally tagged, balanced sample extracted from the C-ORAL-BRASIL corpus. The data selection focused on the identification of utterances which contain relative clauses which was carried through the DB-IPIC platform (Panunzi & Gregori, 2011). The sorting out of relative clauses was done with the AntConc computational toolset (Anthony, 2013). In order to verify the informational structure of the chosen utterances, the WinPitch software was employed (Martin, 2004). The results found: (i) prosodically corroborate the differences between restrictive and non-restrictive relative clauses, whereby the former occur as linearized structures within one informational unit, whereas the latter are patterned through more than one informational unit; and (ii) demonstrate that in Brazilian Portuguese, both relative clause types prefer the Comment information unit as their default carrier. The paper also presents a description of relative clauses through a diagrammatic representation model that allows showing the relationship between main and relative clause, as well as informational structure within an utterance that stands for the realization scope of relative clauses.

Keywords

• Spontaneous speech
• Relative clauses
• Corpus Linguistics