Prosodic and pragmatic properties of affirmative words in European Portuguese
Vera Cabarrão, Ana Isabel Mata · ExLing Conferences · 2012
This paper investigates the correlation between the prosodic behavior and pragmatic functions of affirmative words from a spoken dialogue corpus collected for European Portuguese (EP). The analysis of 460 affirmative answers shows that affirmative words expressing agreement occur more often than those interpreted as auto positive and confirm. Low/falling and high/rising nuclear contours correlate with affirmative words with different pragmatic functions: agreement and confirm are commonly uttered with (H+)L* L%, whereas auto positive is commonly uttered with L*+H / (L+)H* H%. The analysis of acoustic/prosodic cues reveals that the three functions of the affirmative word sim "yes" have significant differences ($p < .001$ and $p < .05$). A pitch concord effect is also found between functions, although expressed in different degrees.