ABSTRACT
The subject matter of this dissertation is the relation between prosodic constituent structure, intonational structure, and focus in European Portuguese (hereafter EP). It is a quest for evidence for (higher level) prosodic domains in this language, on the one hand, and for the prosodic effects of focus, on the other. Its aim is thus twofold: (i) to provide an account of the prosodic structure above the word level, i.e. to examine the phrasal domains of EP sentence phonology; and (ii) to describe how focus is expressed by phonological means. To accomplish this aim I will use both (a version of) the theory of the Prosodic Hierarchy, as developed in work by Selkirk, Nespor and Vogel, Hayes, and others, and (a version of) the theory of Intonation, as developed by Pierrehumbert and colleagues, Ladd, and Grice, among others. The chosen approach is simultaneously theoretical and laboratory based, much along the lines of recent laboratory phonology research, in which experimentally collected speech data is used to investigate questions about the abstract categories of phonological structure.
