ISCA Archive SpeechProsody 2008
ISCA Archive SpeechProsody 2008

The prosody of negation in brazilian portuguese

Meghan Armstrong, Anouschka Bergmann, Terrin Tamati

Sentential negation in spoken Brazilian Portuguese (BP) has three possible structures: containing a negative particle only preverbally (NEG1), pre and post verbally (NEG2) or only post-verbally (NEG3). The choice of structure depends on sociolinguistic and pragmatic factors. This study investigates whether these structures also differ in prosodic patterns. NEG3 is of particular interest: since the negative particle occurs after the verb, a NEG3 sentence is initially segmentally indistinguishable from a similar sentence not containing a negative particle (NoNEG). However, prosodic cues may tell the listener whether a given utterance has a NEG3 or NoNEG structure before the post-verbal region is encountered. A production study elicited NEG1, NEG2, NEG3 and NoNEG utterances and found prosodic differences among the utterance types which may enable listeners to anticipate the presence or absence of a post-verbal negative particle.