This study focuses on the encoding of contrast in European Portuguese (EP), by analyzing a corpus built from a political debate. We will analyze contrastive parallelism structures, which, as will be discussed, are crucial in structuring an argumentative discourse. Therefore, our goal is to discuss the prosodic encoding of contrast in EP, in the specific context of contrastive parallelism, and to relate our data with previous results for other languages. Our data reveals that there is no one-to-one relation between pitch accents and these structures. Such results seem to indicate that the prosodic encoding of contrastive parallelism is gradient.