Halliday’s (1970) and Cagliari’s (2007) model and its implementation to an acoustic and auditory analysis of intonation

Abstract

The main goal of this paper is the analysis of theoretical and methodological aspects of speech melody variation (intonation), with special reference to the pronunciation of one speaker. In order to carry on this study, different types of sentences (declarative, questions, etc.) and the intonational focus as well as the speaker’s attitude (irony, emphasis, etc.) were observed and analyzed with special acoustic software (PRAAT) and with an auditory analysis of a text read by the subject. The aim of this study is to verify whether the acoustic analysis matches with the auditory perception phonetically, according to M.A.K. Halliday’s methodology, following Cagliari (2007), who adapted Halliday’s model to describe the intonation of Portuguese.