Experimento de produção sobre a prosódia da não exaustividade semântica no português brasileiro

Resumo

This study presents the initial findings of a research on non-exhaustivity in Brazilian Portuguese (BP). We aim to verify if and how prosody, more specifically intonation, can direct the interpretation by listeners exposed to utterances with non-exhaustive focus, comparing their intonational contours with those of utterances with exhaustive and contrastive focus. The first results show that non-exhaustive focus can be expressed prosodically by means of specific intonational contours, but also that the pitch curves with either exhaustive or contrastive focus seem to have a very similar intonational shape; for this reason the latter would need lexical markers like ‘only’ and ‘not’.