Análise Entonativa Formal: INTSINT Aplicado ao Português

There is a general consensus among scholars that one same sentence can be said in different ways. Thisconsensus, however, falls apart when the issues are discussed related to the efficiency of prosody inallowing us to say the very same sequence of segments with different meanings. According to Hirst (1987)e t’Hartet. al. (1990) the difficulties of transcribing prosody overcome the difficulties of transcribing thesegmental. They argue that in order to investigate how the melody contributes to the overallunderstanding of an enunciation a metalanguage was required through which the phenomenon can bediscussed. The vocabulary of this metalanguage must consist of appropriate descriptive units throughwhich it is possible to speak of entities and structures at various levels of observation. The semi-automaticanalysis, by means of the programs MOMEL and INTSINT, was used in the description of someintonational languages such as: French (di Cristo, 2011), British English (Auran, Bouzon and Hirst,2004; Brierley, 2011) and analysis of the Brazilian Portuguese rhythm by means of manual INTSINT(Gon alves, 2000). The present study aims to determine if the program of semi-automatic intonationalanalysis - INTSINT - is capable of reproduce melodic variation trends of the Brazilian Portuguese. In ourproposal, the effectiveness of the program to differentiate between declarative and interrogative formsduring reading was evaluated. The following hypotheses were raised: (I) the analysis of intonation withthe program INTSINT allows the choice of different phonological theories regarding the use of entonativeunits;(II) it is possible to distinguish between declarative and interrogative forms by means of codedtarget points to Brazilian Portuguese. An explanatory analysis of the codification performed by MOMELINTSINTwas performed. The corpus of this study consists of 10 short texts, with approximately fivesentences that were read by 10 people of the female sex, aged 20-30 years. The acoustic analysis of thedata was performed using the program Praatversion 4.4.27, available at www.praat.org (Weenink andBoersma, 1997 ,i contains the necessary extensions for the implementation of the programs MOMEL /INTSINT. These last ones are freely available on the site http://aune.lpl.univaix.fr/~auran/english/ressources.html. The high beginning was common for the declarative andinterrogative modalities. This fact was represented by the first target point, coded as T, or the secondtarget point, coded as M; but followed by H, T or U. Nevertheless, they differ at the end of the unit: ininterrogati