Intonational variation in Portuguese

Abstract This chapter describes the nuclear contours and intonational phrasing patterns of the most common sentence types across varieties of Portuguese. The resulting prosodic analysis is the first contribution to a Portuguese_ToBI proposal that offers a comparative description of four Brazilian Portuguese varieties—Baiano, Mineiro, and the Southeast and South areas of Sulista—and four European Portuguese varieties—Standard European Portuguese, Oporto, Alentejo, and Algarve—with the goal of providing a useful foundation for further systematic studies of Portuguese prosody. The analysis is based on data from the Interactive Atlas of the Prosody of Portuguese. Differences in the intonation of narrow-focus statements, commands, and requests, as well as in the distribution of pitch accents, were found to distinguish Brazilian and European Portuguese. The chapter concludes with an overview of the intonational system of Portuguese and its similarities and differences compared with other Romance languages.