THE ROLE OF F0 AND INTENSITY IN DISTINGUISHING YES/NO QUESTIONS FROM NEUTRAL STATEMENTS IN THE NUCLEAR REGION OF THE DIALECT OF PEOPLE FROM CURITIBA

Abstract

This study aims at investigating whether acoustical parameters such as F0 and intensity have a role in distinguishing neutral statements from neutral yes/no questions of the dialect of people from Curitiba, Paraná. For the corpus, two informants (a woman and a man) who were born in Curitiba were recorded following the methodology of the project Multimedia Prosodic Atlas for Romance Languages - Portuguese (AMPER-POR) to which the present research is link to. Based on the analysis of the data, it was possible to conclude that both acoustical parameters play a role in distinguishing the sentences. The values for F0 comparing yes/no questions and neutral sentences are significantly different mainly in the pre-tonic syllables and some of the postonic. Intensity has also shown different patterns with significantly different values for pre-tonic syllables of the oxytones, pre-tonic and tonic syllables of the paroxytones and for pre-tonic, tonic and pos-tonic syllables of the proparoxytones. It can be concluded that F0 and intensity are two important prosodic features in order to distinguish a statement from a yes/no question.

Keywords

• prosody
• dialect from Curitiba
• F0 and e intensity