Study identifies intonation patterns in Brazilian Portuguese

Research is part of an international project that includes the language as spoken in Brazil in a database of several Romance languages.

By Diego Freire

Agência FAPESP – In addition to its own vocabulary and sentence structure characteristics, Portuguese as spoken in Brazil has important differences in relation to that spoken in Portugal and other lusophone countries in terms of rhythm and intonation.

The melody of the spoken language was the focus of the FAPESP-funded study “Intonational phrasing in Brazilian Portuguese” by Flaviane Romani Fernandes Svartman of the Department of Classical and Vernacular Letters of the Faculty of Philosophy, Science and Languages and Literature at the University of São Paulo (FFLCH-USP).

Sentences written in the same way in all variations of Portuguese are spoken differently in each place. While a Brazilian reads the sentence “A libanesa maravilhosa rememorava a melodia” [“The beautiful Lebanese woman remembered the tune”] by clearly pronouncing the tonic syllables of each word, a speaker from Portugal melodically stresses the first and last syllables at a faster pace.

The sentence is part of the recordings made by the study’s researchers. Using readings and spontaneous conversations among groups of speakers of the São Paulo dialect, a database was built in this study that will become part of an Interactive Atlas of the Prosody of Portuguese, known as the InAPoP, a project with which Svartman’s research is connected, coordinated by researcher Sónia Frota, at the University of Lisbon, with funding from the Foundation for Science and Technology of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of Portugal. The recordings allowed the study of intonational structures and the process of forming prosodic speech patterns.

The work by Svartman’s group is also part of the international project Intonational Phrasing in Romance conducted by researchers from the Aix Marseille Université in France, the Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea in the Basque Country, the University of Lisbon in Portugal and the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Catalonia. These investigations included Brazilian Portuguese in a database of the intonation of several Romance languages, the Romance Languages Database (RLD).

This is an extensive database of spoken language originally created for Catalan, Portuguese and Spanish, composed of sentences with a subject, verb and object in that order and standardized in number of syllables and syntactic and prosodic complexity – thus allowing direct comparisons to be made among the languages and their variants. In addition to Svartman, Pilar Prieto of Catalonia, Sónia Frota of Portugal and Gorka Elordieta of Spain are collaborating on the RLD.

A portion of the database on the São Paulo dialect is already available to researchers and those interested on the InAPoP site. With the help of undergraduate and master’s students at the FFLCH, recordings were made of interrogative, exclamative and focus sentences – those in which the emphasis is placed on a particular part of the sentence, such as when one says “John came, but not Peter, emphasizing the word ‘John’ rather than ‘Peter’.”

One of the recordings was made during an assignment about location and map directions involving women between the ages of 20 and 40; another was made during an oral report about the career and experiences of an individual over the age of 65. Individuals are divided by gender and age to avoid speech variations in a single group.

Descriptions and analyses of the intonational phrasing of some of these data were then made to compare it with other variations of Brazilian and European Portuguese. The results were published in the paper, “Determining factors in assigning pitch accents in neutral sentences in Portuguese,” presented at the Castilho – II International Congress of Historical Linguistics at USP.

Guinea-Bissau and Europe

In comparing other Romance languages, the research observed that there is a melodic variation between the subject and the predicate in Spanish, Portuguese from northern Portugal and Brazilian Portuguese that is unlike standard European Portuguese – the dialect of Lisbon.

The study also included the variety of Portuguese spoken in Guinea-Bissau for purposes of comparative analysis. The inclusion was provided by contact with exchange students from that African country who had matriculated as students in the language program at USP/FFLCH through a university international exchange program.

The study investigated up to what point the varieties of Portuguese were closer together or farther apart in terms of their prosodic aspects. The data that were analyzed from Brazilian Portuguese as well as from Portuguese spoken in Guinea-Bissau show melodic variations associated with nearly every word of the sentences.

Brazilian Portuguese has no variation after the final tonic syllable of the last word that makes up the subject in neutral sentences, while such melodic variation is noticeable in the Portuguese of Guinea-Bissau.

For example, in the sentence, “O boliviano mulherengo memorizava uma melodia” [“The Bolivian womanizer memorized the tune”], a Brazilian would melodically emphasize the tonic syllables of the subject – the “a” in “boliviano” and the “ren” in “mulherengo” – and a speaker from Guinea-Bissau would also emphasize the last syllable of the last word of this element. In other sentences, speakers of Portuguese from Guinea-Bissau would emphasize different syntactic elements such as the object.

The studies received institutional support in compiling the speech databases from FAPESP as well as the Laboratory to Support Research and Language Teaching (Lapel) at USP/FFLCH.