Recursion and coordination in Portuguese from prepositional phrases: from prosody to syntax in psycholinguistic studies

From prosodic clues, verified with psycholinguistic reading experiments, we have here the original proposal, under the postulates of Generative Grammar, to show whether the prosody marks syntactic structure related to Recursion or to Coordination, presented in the Prepositional Phrases (PPs) following a Verbal Phrase in Brazilian Portuguese. The pitch curve, detected by the use of the Praat platform, allows an analysis of Intonational Phrases, which have acoustic features, like frontier, and linguistic features, like syntactic clues (cf. LADD, 1986, 1988). The hypotheses are that there is a reset in intonational sentences of constructions with coordinated adjunct PPs and no reset in intonational sentences of constructions with recursive adjunct PPs. The absence of this reset corresponds to a prosodic clue of the recursive mechanism.