Text-tune accommodation processes in the intonation of European Portuguese yes-no questions: an OT analysis

A key notion in intonational research is the independence of sentence intonation (tune) and its segmental configuration (text). Yet, there is one aspect of intonation that fewer studies are concerned with: the text-tune interface (TTI). The goal of this paper is rendering accommodation processes at the TTI more explicit by formalizing them within the framework of Optimality Theory (OT) and the autosegmental-metrical (AM) model of intonation. The combination of OT and AM is suitable because OT takes conflict resolution as its central notion, and AM successfully bridges the gap between the continuous nature of the distribution of fundamental frequency and OT’s deterministic violation mark assignment. We base our analysis on reported acoustic data of information-seeking yes-no questions in different varieties of European Portuguese (EP), where three text-tune accommodation (TTA) strategies can be observed: tonal truncation, vowel epenthesis, and blocking of vowel deletion. By postulating the phonological representation of tonal alignment in pitch-accents and boundary tones, we put forward a set of intonational as well as segmental faithfulness and markedness constraints, which capture TTA strategy selection in EP and prove to be useful in intonational typology, laying the groundwork for further research on TTA processes in a consistent and comparable way.