The relationship between lexical stress and intonation in the prosodical characterization of the Brazilian Portuguese spoken in the North of Brazil

This paper aims to present an intradialectal analysis of the modal intonation role on Brazilian Portuguese spoken in northern Brazil. We selected speech samples from four survey areas of Pará State from AMPER corpora. The corpus is formed by 12 sentences grouped by lexical stress and realized in both intonational modalities. The data analyzed in this work comprised 1,728 data (12 sentences x 2 intonation modalities x 3 best repetitions x 4 survey areas x 6 speakers) and to handle such an amount of data an automated data processing was carried out. So, the data reveal an identity between the spoken varieties in the north of Brazil with regard to modal intonation. The results support a hypothesis of a circumflex intonation contour to mark questions, valid in all survey areas, which reinforces the previous description for the interrogative in PB, rising on the stressed syllable, downward on the posttonic syllable.