“To win the girl...”: Detachment and Prosody in Brazilian and European Portuguese

In this article, we study the prosodic behavior of detached adverbial clauses in Brazilian Portuguese (PB) and European Portuguese (PE). We use the theoretical framework of prosodic phonology (Nespor; Vogel,1994) and Intonational Phonology (Pierrehumbert 1980, Ladd 1996). 1800 read data (900 of each Portuguese variety) were analyzed and measurements were made on two prosodic parameters: melodic contour and duration at the end of the Intonational Phrase (IP). The results reveal that the detachment in the oral language seems to be primarily licensed, in PB as in PE, because the speakers insert longer duration in the final syllables of the IP. For PB, in addition to the phonetic variation given by the durational behavior of the last syllables of the IP, the detachment is characterized by a different melodic pattern from the adverbial clauses attached to the main sentence (L+H*L% for the sentences with the main clause and L+H*H% for the detached ones), which suggests that the phenomenon constitutes a different phonological pattern in Brazilian Portuguese