RFP 2015 da Silva, Tenani Prosody and writing: what does the unconventional spelling in word segmentation reveal about the prosodic functioning of clitics? Lilian Maria da Silva, Luciani Tenani (UNESP/Brazil) In this poster, we shall analyze the unconventional segmentation of written words in Brazilian Portuguese (henceforth, BP), particularly, two types of them: (i) hyposegmentation between clitics and words, as “denovo” (“de novo” – again), and (ii) word hypersegmentation, as “de mais” (“demais” – too much). Hyposegmentation means the lack of a graphic boundary between the clitic and the word. Hypersegmentation creates a space within the word. In this case, the segmented syllable can be related, according to the phonic chain, to a clitic in Portuguese. To phonological studies, the notion of segmentation is important, for instance, to investigate the prosodic status of clitics. Clitics can be prosodized more or less internally to the prosodic word. The distinction between clitics (proclitics or enclitics to its host) and syllables (initial or final) is relevant to define if clitics are (or not) different than words and affixes. Depending on the approach, clitics are related to affixes, to independent words or to a specific prosodic constituent, as Nespor and Vogel (2007) point out. These characteristics set the clitics apart as units which are hard to formalize in the prosodic structure. In this regard, as to the manner clitics and their host word form a prosodic unit, it is discussed whether they constitute a specific prosodic domain, the clitic group (NESPOR AND VOGEL, 2007) or the composite group (VOGEL, 2009), or, yet, whether the clitic can be integrated into other levels of prosodic hierarchy such as the phonological phrase or the prosodic word (SELKIRK, 2004). In different languages, favorable evidence is found for each one of the mentioned propositions. Still, since the propositions are not consensual, clitic prosodization remains an open question in Prosodic Phonology. The answer to this question is deeply important, since the basic assumption of prosodic theory is the idea of universality of prosodic information. In other words, the way clitics form a prosodic unit should be predictable. Within this framework, we propose an analysis of prepositional clitics’ hyposegmentation and words’ hypersegmentation in BP. We aim to identify the prosodization of clitics and thereby establish a relationship between phonological structures and written words. The analyzed material comprises 266 written texts produced by students attending the junior high school at a public school in Brazil. The written texts belong to the “Banco de Dados de Escrita do Ensino Fundamental”, organized by professors of the State University of São Paulo (UNESP), and are freely available at: http://www.convenios.grupogbd.com/redacoes/Login. From this material, we have extracted unconventional word segmentation data involving clitics and syllables which are potential prepositional clitics, as illustrated earlier. As to the material and the relevant data, it is important to notice that the spellings were produced during writing activities at school, thus not being results obtained by controlled experiments created exclusively to observe a given linguistic phenomenon. The analyses set forth about the clitics’ spelling and evidence of the prosodic functioning of clitics depart from a set of assumptions based on phenomena found in speech and observable in writing. These hypotheses are based on a theoretical assumption about the relationship between orality and writing: the alphabetic writing can be defined as a system whose main characteristic would be the phonetic-phonological representation, though imperfect, of language. From this point of view, the phonetic-phonological representation ensures that orality is present in writing (CORREA, 2013). This perspective leads us, on one hand, to assume the existence of an intrinsic relation between orality and writing and, on the other hand, to diverge from a perspective according to which characteristics of orality cause an undesired interference in written texts (PINTO, 1997). As a consequence, the adopted perspective about the relationship between