A Contribution to the diachronic study of Galician and Portuguese prosodies

What is it about?

Galician and Portuguese have a common origin. This genetic affiliation is not accompanied by any historical continuity (Monteagudo 2012: 38), as these language varieties were separated in a distant past, mainly through the establishment of a political and administrative boundary between their territories. This lack of contact is interesting when studying common and divergent linguistic phenomena, in particular in the field of prosody and intonation, as it presupposes a challenge to historical study, given that only recently have sound recordings of speech. Our proposal is to contribute towards a diachronic study of the intonation of absolute interrogatives in Galician and Portuguese by using synchronic data collected over the past decade. We aim to show the usefulness of the quantitative method of measuring prosodic distances, because it enables us to determine geographic areas using common standards and shows the degree of separation between the intonations of the two varieties.

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