O papel da prosódia como portadora de sentido na desambiguização de enunciados em língua francesa

Abstract

This work aims to verify the participation of prosodic clues as disambiguating elements of statements in French. Ambiguity leads to poor understanding and, in oral language, we know that in the absence of a context that can guide correct understanding, prosody effectively contributes to this end. As research questions, we have: (1) Is prosody sufficient to disambiguate an oral statement in the face of a lack of contextual clues? (2) What prosodic elements are used in the disambiguation function? As research hypotheses we consider that: prosody by itself is capable of disambiguating statements isolated from context; among the prosodic elements used to disambiguate utterances, the pause and the accentuation and intonation patterns play a preponderant role; the knowledge of how prosodic elements are used in French to disambiguate decontextualized utterances can contribute to provide subsidies for the construction of learning materials that present the functions of prosody in the production of meanings. To achieve our goal, we carried out an experimental research in which native Frenchspeaking speakers participated in recordings of 8 pairs of utterances, reading them with their expressed context. With these recordings and with the aid of the Praat tool, we eliminated the context and obtained 16 ambiguous utterances, to which we added another 8 equally ambiguous utterances, but with clearly present prosodic clues, taken from a textbook. With these 24 statements, we created a perception test with the Google Forms tool and asked 44 native French speakers to respond. Results show that prosodic, syntactic and semantic factors are involved and that depending on the kind of utterance, one of them can exhibit greater impact on the attribution of meaning.