The prosodic structure of disfluencies in Brazilian Portuguese

• Published in: Cadernos de estudos linguisticos 2012-01, Vol.54 (1), p.25-40
• Main Authors: Scarpa, Ester, Fernandes-Svartsman, Flaviane
• Format: Article
• Language: Portuguese
• ISSN: 0102-5767

The aim of this article is to look at the tendencies of occurrence of disfluency (hesitating repetitions and non-emphatic vowel lengthening) within prosodic domains. Data from spontaneous speech were analyzed using principles of Prosodic and Intonational Phonology. The main conclusions are: (i) hesitating repetitions and lengthnenings are more frequent with prosodic clitics; (ii) hesitating repetitions involve neither the head of phonological phrase nor the head of the intonational phrase; (iii) if the repetition involves the phonological word, this is not the head of a phonological or intonational phrase; and (iv) there is lowering of pitch range of the repetition stretches, as Viscardi (2012) has already noticed; (v) after hesitating repetitions, there is a strong possibility of occurrence of assignment of (Brazilian Portuguese) focus configuration (H*+L or L*+H L-). Seen as "disfluency" by the literature, hesitation stretches of the utterance are part of the dynamics of speech and elaboration of the oral text. They are unpredictable in the discourse, albeit cyclical. When they do occur, however, they are not prosodically random. Adapted from the source document