Contrastive parallelism in European Portuguese: Prosodic features of a cohesion mechanism

This paper focuses on the encoding of contrast in European Portuguese (EP), specifically by analysing contrastive parallelism structures, which seem to be crucial in the construction of the type of discourse that will be analysed: the argumentative discourse. Hence, my main goal is discussing how contrast is prosodically encoded in these structures and to relate the results with previous ones for other languages. The data show that contrastive parallelism has specific acoustic properties and that there is no one-to-one relation between pitch accents and these structures. Therefore, the results seem to indicate that the prosodic encoding of such structures is gradient.