Vergleichende Perspektiven zur Prosodie und Informationsstruktur im Deutschen und im brasilianischen Portugiesisch

This paper focuses on, in a deliberately simplified and summarised form, the interaction between prosodic features at sentence level and information-structural aspects in German and Brazilian Portuguese (BP) utterances, relying on a few fundamental prosodic concepts. These provide the foundation for a comparison between essential intonational contours of German and BP based on the Duden Grammatik (2009, 2022) and two essays by de Moraes (1998, 2006). Comparison shows that both German and BP share not only their main concepts but also their mechanisms. Within both languages, focus and topic are marked by prosody, primarily also by the same pitch movements (rising accent for topic and falling accent for focus). Both languages also make a distinction between broad and narrow focus, each marked by specific contours, and there are also similar special contours for contrast and correction. The major differences appear to be the inverse assignment of accent tones and the double falling accent in neutral narrow focus in BP. Furthermore, the restriction of the topical accent to the last thematic component, mentioned by de Moraes, suggests that this may lead to difficulties for Brazilians when topical accents must be given to elements other than the last rhematic element in German.