Prosodization of prepositional clitics and prosodic words in Brazilian Portuguese: Investigation of phonetic cues

In this paper, syllable duration (Vowel-to-Vowel unit) and F0 variation are analyzed as cues to distinguish the prosodization of prepositional clitic-host sequence from a syllable within a prosodic word in Brazilian Portuguese (BP). A production task was created to assess 1) whether the syllable production time helps to identify a clitic boundary and a word boundary and 2) whether the F0 configuration aligned to a clitic syllable differs from the F0 configuration aligned to a syllable in a word boundary. The results show that: 1) the syllable duration measurement supports the hypothesis that there is no distinction between prepositional clitics and a syllable which is part of a prosodic word (PW); 2) the pitch range of tonal events associated to the syllable that bears the PW boundary differs from that associated to the syllables that bear a clitic-host sequence boundary. Based on these results we argued that the prepositional clitics are prosodized as a syllable adjoined to its host. This interpretation leads us to suggest that the relevant domain for prepositional clitic prosodization is between PW and PPh (Phonological Phrase) in BP.