From the coast to the interior: geographic and prosodic distances?

Abstract

The need for a description and comparison of prosodic features of Romance language varieties is the basis of the international project AMPER (Multimedia Prosodic Atlas of the Romance Area). In it are involved teams from different European and Latin American research centres, which adopt common methodologies for gathering and analysing corpora. The analyses that have already been made show a rich linguistic variety in the Romance space with regard to prosodic variation, even within the same language area. In this article, we present results for some intonational structures in two regions of continental Portugal, covering the coast and the countryside.
Our study will focus on various interrogative sentence structures, using the usual experimental analysis protocol defined for the project.