High Initial Tones and Plateaux in Spanish and Portuguese Neutral Declaratives: Consequences to the Relevance of F0, Duration and Vowel Quality as Stress Correlates

In order to verify these hypothesis a direct comparison containing neutral declaratives in both Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese was elaborated. The results show that indeed Portuguese presents a more complex intonational system than Spanish in declaratives sentence initial position. Results suggest that pitch in Brazilian Portuguese sentence initial position not only express lexical stress, but phrasal tones as well. According to these results the phrasal tones in Brazilian Portuguese can be presented in the intonational contour as either peaks or plateaux. Results also suggest that duration in Spanish does not play a crucial role as it does in Portuguese. Additionally, the outcome of this research indicates that Brazilian Portuguese has developed a very acute and singular system to express stress trough duration. This system seems to be adjusted according to segmental quality and to apply to different dialects over the Brazilian country. This research also shows that the effect of stress in vowel quality is much more consistent in Brazilian Portuguese than in Spanish. Together, these results have implications in the way in which these three acoustic correlate interplay in order to express stress in these two languages.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Spanish

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2008

Author dc:creator

• Ferreira, Letania

Contributors dc:contributor

• Hualde, Jose Ignacio

• Language, Modern

Language dc:language

eng

Identifier

(MiAaPQ)AAI3347300

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/86160