A Percepção do Foco Prosódico no Português do Brasil

Resumo

This Study presents a perceptive approach of the informational and contrastive prosodic focus phenomenona in Brazilian Portuguese, studying this process in relation to its prosodic category, phonological word or phonological phrase, describing the prosodic marking of focus based on the results of  perceptual tests on the identification of focus type and its placement on the utterance. The corpus of 17 utterances were recorded by 4 subjects, producing the sentence “O marido da Renata derrubou suco de laranja” (Renata's husband spilled orange juice) in differentt ways, with the  following focused structures: (i) the entire sentence, (ii) de laranja, (iii) suco, (iv) suco de laranja, (v) derrubou, (vi) derrubou suco de laranja, (vii) da Renata, (viii) O marido and (ix) O marido da Renata. These utterances were randomly presented in a forced choice test accomplished by 20 volunteers, which were supposed to indicate the focus type and the part of the sentence on focus. The results indicated that sentences with a larger extension of the focused structure (phonological phrase) were significantly less recognized) than the ones with a smaller focused structure (phonological word).