Post-tonic syllables and prosodic boundaries in Brazilian Portuguese
Eneida Goes Leal, Raquel Santana Santos, Universidade de São Paulo
This paper aims to verify how prosodic boundaries may affect the duration of post-tonic syllables in Brazilian Portuguese. The results show that the only prosodic boundary that has significant lengthening is intonational phrase, and its application relates both to post-tonics and tonics. Additionally, we found that there is no relation between legthening and higher prosodic levels, since there was no significant difference in the clitic group and phonological phrase. Interesting to note is that even with lengthening in the post-tonics, they are never longer than the stressed syllables in the same domain. Finally we found that there was no statistical correlation between duration and vowel quality, but there was a correlation between the consonant voicing and duration.