Banca de DEFESA: 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), Jakobson, Fant and Halle (1951), 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 and 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 were more sensitive to neutral yes-no question and incredulous yes-no question and (3) the melodic configuration of the confirmation and request for confirmation proposed by Moraes (2008) proved to be atypical in the dialect of the investigated subjects. We ratify the phonological representation defined by Moraes (2008) in relation to the neutral yes-no and incredulous yes-no questions. The confirmation of the intonational behavior of the requests for confirmation and rhetoric yes-no questions will depend on further studies. In general, we verified that the observation of the configuration of the melodic contours can indicate if the manifestation of a given propositional meaning contributes or not to the interpretation intended in a given text.