Maria João Freitas

Comments on Intonational Phrasing in English

The Intonational Phrase organization of a sentence is a hybrid beast. It sometimes shows a tight correlation with the semantic properties of the sentence, namely what the sentence means in standard truth conditional terms. It sometimes appears to be a reflex of the Focus structure of the sentence. Sometimes it appears to be correlated with the length of the constituents of a sentence. And sometimes it seems merely to reflect a stylistic option in the utterance of a sentence. This paper centers on the ways in which intonational phrasing in phonological representation is dependent on the properties of the interface syntactic representation, giving but a nod to other factors. It assumes a grammatical architecture in which syntax mediates between phonology and semantics and where the syntax-phonology interface is characterized in terms of a set of optimality theoretic interface constraints (cf. Selkirk 1995, Truckenbrodt 1999).

Grammar and frequency effects in the acquisition of prosodic words in European portuguese

This paper investigates the acquisition of prosodic words in European Portuguese (EP) through analysis of grammatical and statistical properties of the target language and child speech. The analysis of grammatical properties shows that there are solid cues to the prosodic word (PW) in EP, and the presence of early word-based phonology in child speech shows that EP children are aware of these cues. It is thus hypothesized that grammatical properties could play a role in the development of the PW by promoting the early production of the different word shapes found in the language. The analysis of statistical properties of the input, namely word shape frequencies in adult speech and child-directed speech, shows that they constrain early word shapes in child speech in ways similar to recent reports on other languages: a fairly high frequency of monosyllabic shapes, and especially of monosyllabic CV shapes, in the input agrees with the production of subminimal words in child speech; a fairly high frequency of trisyllabic and larger shapes in the input (adult speech in particular) matches the early development of words larger than a binary foot. These patterns, together with the co-occurrence of truncation to subminimal shapes in the initial and later stages, as well as the presence of prosodic fillers regardless of word size, support the claim that early words in EP are not constrained by minimality or maximality requirements. The potential interaction of grammar and frequency effects in PW acquisition is discussed in the light of the present findings and comparable data available in the literature for English, French, Spanish and Catalan.

Prosodies : with special reference to Iberian languages

Prosodies is a collection of recent papers in phonetics and phonology. It deals with a wide range of subjects like intonation, prosodic phrasing, rhythm, word stress, phrasal prominence, syllable structure, segmental variation and change, and the perception of segments, features, and their acoustic properties. The book is particularly valuable because it focuses on languages largely underrepresented in the literature, e.g., Cairene and Lebanese Arabic, Central Catalan and insular dialects of Catalan, Galician, Italian, Standard and Northern European Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Peninsular Spanish and different varieties of Argentine Spanish.

DESENVOLVIMENTO FONOLÓGICO EM CRIANÇAS DOS 3 ANOS E 6 MESES AOS 4 ANOS E 6 MESES DE IDADE NASCIDAS COM MUITO BAIXO PESO

O presente trabalho tem o objectivo central de avaliar o desenvolvimento fonologico de criancas nascidas com muito baixo peso, contribuindo com evidencia empirica para a reflexao sobre o papel das variaveis fonologicas na avaliacao do desenvolvimento linguistico infantil. Foi implementado um estudo com 30 criancas na faixa etaria dos 3 anos e 6 meses aos 4 anos e 6 meses, sendo que 15 pertenciam a populacao de criancas nascidas com muito baixo peso e as restantes a de criancas nascidas com peso adequado, emparelhadas por genero e idade. Observou-se o desempenho segmental das criancas nos dois grupos em estudo, avaliando-se a relacao entre a producao das consoantes do inventario segmental do Portugues Europeu e a sua distribuicao em funcao das variaveis fonologicas posicao na palavra , posicao na silaba e acento de palavra . O objectivo central foi o de testar a eficacia das variaveis fonologicas acima referidas na identificacao de diferencas de desenvolvimento fonologico entre os dois grupos de criancas. Atraves do teste de Qui- Quadrado e da comparacao frequencial, verificou-se que as criancas nascidas com muito baixo peso apresentavam um desempenho verbal inferior ao das criancas com peso adequado, no que diz respeito as variaveis fonologicas testadas.

No de-accenting in (or of) phrases: Evidence from Arabic for cross-linguistic and cross-dialectical prosodic variation

Prosodic marking of information status varies. Ladd (1996) suggests that Germanic languages de-accent given information within both phrases and sentences whereas Italian only de-accents given phrases within a sentence. Swerts, Krahmer and Avesani (2002) demonstrated cross-linguistic variation within noun phrases in a comparative study of Dutch and Italian. This paper re-creates the experiment with speakers of Cairene Arabic (CA) and extends the methodology to examine whether phrases are de-accented within a sentence. Production and function test results are reported, and both suggest that information status is not encoded prosodically in CA: speakers did not de-accent given elements within a phrase, nor given phrases in a sentence; monolingual CA listeners were unable to retrieve the discourse function of phrases or sentences from prosody alone.