Production of narrow focus and the secondary stress in Brazilian Portuguese yes/no questions

Abstract

This paper investigates the relation, in perception and production, between prosodic marking of narrow focus and secondary stress in yes-no questions in Brazilian Portuguese. A 21-utterance corpus was built, presenting systematic variations in the focalized words, in terms of position of focus in the utterance, and number of pre-tonic syllables (linked to the presence of a secondary stress). The focused word appears at the following prosodic contexts: at the end of utterance, as head of the intonation phrase, or at a strong position as head of phonological phrase (ɸ), or at a weak position in ɸ. The phonological phrase may be found at the beginning, middle or final part of utterance. Stimuli were evaluated by 20 listeners for the localization of the narrow focus, with high recognition scores for all the contexts analysed. Acoustic descriptions support a description of narrow focus performed with a geminate intonation peak related to a secondary stress on the focused word, and a temporal compression of the geminated peak in words presenting just one pretonic syllable, that is, without favourable conditions for secondary stress; a significant lengthening of segmental duration was observed in the stressed syllable of the focused word.

Keywords

• Entoação
• Foco
• Interrogação
• Acento secundário
• Fonologia prosódica