Os aspectos prosódicos que delimitam o operador argumentativo "porque" na leitura em voz alta de falantes do sexto ano do ensino fundamental

Abstract

This research sought to identify, describe and analyze the prosodic and intonational aspects that delimit the argumentative operator “porque” based on the reading aloud performed by sixth-grade elementary school students in the city of Uberlândia, in the state of Minas Gerais. This research was based on the theoretical proposals of Prosodic Phonology (Nespor; Vogel, 2007) and Intonational Phonology (Ladd, 2008). This work found an answer to the following question: what are the prosodic aspects that delimit the argumentative operator “porque”? To answer this question and contribute to the prosodic description of this argumentative operator, in this work, we analyzed the reading aloud of 10 (ten) sixth-grade elementary school students. The corpus consisted of 10 sentences containing the argumentative operator “porque”. Each participant read each sentence three times, with the aim of identifying patterns, trends and deviations between the readings. Based on the proposed objective, the following hypotheses were formulated: 1) The speech time will decrease as the readings were performed; 2) the percentage of speech time of the argumentative operator will show an increase relative to the speech time of the sentences; 3) the pause time before the argumentative operator “porque” will present little variation in time between readings; 4) the value of the tessitura (difference between maximum F0 and minimum F0) will be lower with each reading; 5) there will be a high border tone (H%) before the argumentative operator “porque”. Data collection was carried out following the following steps: i) the recording of the data occurred at the educational institution (a school in the municipal network of Uberlândia-MG), using the Tascam DR-05 digital recorder, and it was recorded in .wav format; ii) we segmented and coded the data; iii) we described and analyzed the data in the acoustic analysis program Praat. From a prosodic point of view, the results suggest that: a) as the reader repeats the reading of the experimental sentences, the elocution time tends to decrease; b) the percentage of elocution time of the argumentative operator “porque” tends to be greater in L03; c) the pause is a relevant prosodic marker performed before the argumentative operator “porque”, since with each reading the percentage relative to the elocution time of the sentence increased; d) the tessitura value tends to be greater in the first reading of a sentence and decrease in the following readings. From an intonational point of view, the results suggest that the reader, in addition to the pause, tends to perform a boundary tone H% before the argumentative operator “porque”.