CONTRIBUIÇÕES PARA A CARACTERIZAÇÃO PROSÓDICA E ENTOACIONAL DA FALA SOB SUSPEIÇÃO

Abstract

The present research focuses on the speech prosodic and intonational characterization under suspicion, being suspicious the condition in which the formally accused individual is due to the practice of an act contrary to the legal system. In the prosodic characterization, there is the analysis of the training tone of the first Intonational Phrases (Is) of the speech under suspicion, in order to find the relationship between the prosodic and the intonational structure of this speech, according to the theoretical outline of the Prosodic Phonology, from Nespor and Vogel (1986) and the Intonational Phonology, from Ladd (1996, 2008). Concerning the intonational characterization, the analysis of values of the Fundamental Frequency is proposed (F0) for the statements under suspicion. To do the research, statements produced by a suspect individual (B) in a TV interview were selected, in which, along with the subject accused of coauthorship (A), responded to questions concerning the crime for which the subject was being charged: homicide. As it consisted of an interview, two categories of suspicion: the Latent Suspicion (LS), existing in the statements which directly respond to the interviewer‟s question, and the Non-Latent Suspicion (NLS), present in the statements produced in the turn changes between B and A, which have a content that is not related to the interviewer‟s question. According to selection criteria of I, 15 LS statements and 13 NLS statements were selected to compose the corpus of the present study, which were transcribed according to the ToBI (Tone and Break Indices) notation, with the use of the software PRAAT. The obtained results in the training tone analysis of the Is either LS as well as NLS showed that, predominantly, the speech under suspicion presents the same tone characterization described in the literature about intonational outlines of statements in the Brazilian Portuguese (BP), as mentioned by Tenani (2002), Fernandes (2007) and Serra (2009), which demonstrates the explanatory power of the Prosodic Phonology and the Intonational Phonology for the prosodic characterization of BP statements. In LS, the attention was drawn for the presence of the hybrid‟ tone L+H L%, in the small Is which constitute composed Is; hybrid as it presents pitch accent of beginning of I and a frontier tone for the end of I. In terms of the measures analysis of F0 of LS and NLS, the results showed that the presence of discourse marker is connected to the decrease of F0 values of the statement. On the other hand, if the LS and the NLS statements without a discourse marker are compared, it had also been noticed that the first ones have a higher F0 value, which highlights the relevance of the proposed suspicion categorization: LS and NLS. Besides this, the present research indicates study possibilities still not developed concerning the prosody and intonation of BP statements, specially involving the implications of the presence or not of discourse marker or of paralinguistic elements, common to the spontaneous speech