Banca de QUALIFICAÇÃO: JULIANA LEMOS MARINHO DA SILVA

MELODIC CONTOURS IN INTERROGATIVE SENTENCES PRODUCED IN LOUD READING BY TEACHERS FROM MUNICIPAL SCHOOALS OF IPOJUCA: AN ANALYSIS OF PRODUCTION AND PERCEPTION

Melodic contours. Interrogative sentences. Propositional attitudes. Loud reading.

This dissertation aims at analyzing the relationship between intonation contours and the
production and perception of propositional attitudes in interrogative sentences. By means of
loud reading audio files recorded by 24 elementary school teachers from the city of Ipojuca,
Pernambuco (PE), 4 melodic patterns of the interrogative mode are analyzed: neutral yes-no
question, request for confirmation, incredulous yes-no question and rhetoric yes-no question,
as described by Moraes (2008). This thesis is based upon the theoretical model on
Intonational Phonology as studied by Pierrehumbert (1980), Ladd (1996) and Gussenhoven
(2004). In addition, we find theoretical background in the works on prosodic-intonational
functions analysis as postulated by Troubetzkoy (1949), Fónagy (1993), Pierrehumbert and
Hischberg (1990), Aubergé (2002a, 2002b) and Moraes (2012, 2016), as well as in studies
that show how to distinguish the contrastive variation from the simple allophonic variation in
the intonation of Brazilian Portuguese (PT-BR) (MORAES, 1993, 1998, 2008, 2016;
MORAES & COLAMARCO, 2007; MORAES et al., 2011, 2015). Furthermore, we
investigate the interrogative melodic patterns of BP correlated with loud reading processing
in a grammatical perspective. The loud reading of narrative texts are part of the 5 experiments
carried in this investigation. The corpus is formed by 192 speech signals which correspond to
the total of the loud reading audio files analyzed in this thesis. These readings were
performed by the 24 elementary teachers who participated in the study as volunteers and plus
12 speech signals which refer to readings performed by the reader-control (the researcher
herself). The recorded speech signals were phonetically/phonologically transcribed using
Praat software. The results indicate that: (1) the teachers who volunteered in the production
experiments did not always infer the intended propositional attitudes in the texts, making
them prosodically utter different propositional patterns, which then caused a change in the
interpretation of the uttered data; (2) in the perception experiments, they often failed to infer
the intended propositional attitudes, which caused some difficulty in capturing the bad or the
good processing of loud readings performed by the reader-control; (3) in an experiment
containing audio files of isolated questions, they were mostly able to identify their
propositional attitudes. In general, the melodic contours of interrogative sentences and the
responses of perception experiments on propositional attitudes confirm the studies published
by Moraes (2008) who is responsible for determining distinctive intonational features of
propositional attitudes in PT-BR.