Características prosódicas de enunciados numéricos: um estudo de produção de foco

Abstract

Focus is a linguistic phenomenon whereby elements in an utterance stand out of their environment. The studies about prosodic marking of information status show that there are similarities and differences across languages and, in general, they use organized syntactically words in sentences. But, what about numbers? The current study aims to analyze prosodic features of numerical utterances in Brazilian Portuguese and Dutch. Twenty speakers of both Dutch and Brazilian Portuguese read out such sequences, in which target numbers were inserted that could either represent new (firstly mentioned) or given (repeated) information. For this, we conducted a production experiment in order to select the corpus composed of numbers placed in different focus conditions within groupings with nine numbers. The results demonstrated interesting similarities and differences in the behavior of acoustic measures of duration, mean pitch and mean intensity in both languages and in all conditions and positions in which the numbers were arranged. Speakers of Dutch, for instance, more consistently marked focused information than Brazilian speakers, albeit that this depended on the structural position of a number in a sequence.