Blurb:

Recent research on yes-no question intonation in European and Brazilian Portuguese suggests that there is a high variety of nuclear patterns of yes-no questions not only between European and Brazilian varieties but also across European Portuguese varieties (Frota et al. 2015, Silva 2014, Cruz et al. 2014, among others). However, there is a lack of studies that include a detailed description and comparison of yes-no questions in different varieties of Portuguese. The first goal of the current study is to describe the intonation of yes-no questions in European and Brazilian Portuguese (EP and BP, respectively) by analyzing a wide range of utterances and regions covered within the project Interactive Atlas of Prosody of Portuguese. Considering the fact that interrogatives can have different pragmatic functions, we decided to analyze yes-no questions also from a pragmatic point of view, thus looking at neutral and focused yes-no questions. Studies have shown that speakers can signal the difference between neutral and focused questions intonationally, in various languages (Frota 2002, Savino & Grice 2007, Lee et al. 2008, Truckenbrodt 2009, Crespo-Sendra 2011). Some studies have found a gradient contrast between the two types of questions, while other studies indicate that the contrast is expressed categorically. Therefore, the aims of this paper are: a) to analyze and compare phonologically the nuclear configuration of neutral and focused yes-no questions across Portuguese varieties; and b) to investigate the strategies that EP and BP speakers use to distinguish between neutral and focalized yes/no questions.