Verbos inacusativos e inergativos no PB: a interface sintaxe-prosódia

Abstract

This work aims to investigate prosodic aspects on broad focus intransitive sentences in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) under a syntax-prosody perspective. Although they are, in general, superficially similar in BP, unaccusative and unergative sentences present different syntactic configurations. On the other hand, besides being superficially similar, inchoative and unaccusative sentences present some syntactic similarities. Therefore, we precisely investigate whether there are prosodic similarities/differences among the three intransitive structures in BP that could point out their syntactic similarities/differences. Based on analysis of sentences recordings provided by 3 participants, Figueiredo Silva and Seara (2006) found different pitch contours patterns for unergative and unaccusative sentences - major pitch movement on the verb in unergative sentences and both verb and subject movements in unaccusative sentences. Irwin (2010, 2011) verified different accent patterns for unaccusative, which presented a subject accent pattern, and unergative sentences, which presented a more diverse pattern, in which the accent was assigned to either the subject or the verb. In order to investigate whether there are prosodic differences between unergative and unaccusative sentences in BP, the first experiment gathered audio recordings provided by 12 adults (5 men and 7 women) reading broad focus questions and answers, which included either unaccusative or unergative verbs. The results suggest that it is given more prominence to the verb in both kinds of sentences. A second experiment based on the same model was developed in order to increase the number of participants (12 women) and to investigate prosodic similarities/differences between unaccusative and inchoative sentences. The results support the ones found for experiment 1 and suggest greater similarity between unaccusative and inchoative sentences when compared to unergative ones.