Rising and conservation of non final posttonic mid vowels in two speech styles

• Autor(a) principal: De Paula, Alessandra
• Data de Publicação: 2017
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: letrônica
• Texto Completo: https://revistaseletronicas.pucrs.br/ojs/index.php/letronica/article/view/25071
• topic: Sociolinguistics; Phonology; Raising; Vocalism; Posttonic.; Sociolinguística; Fonologia; Alteamento; Vocalismo; Postônico.

The variationist sociolinguistics research done by De Paula (2015) in Rio de Janeiro State studied the process of change that occurs in the non-final posttonic vocalism in Portuguese. The results show that the raising process affects the both non-final posttonic mid vowels /e/ and /o/, which are in full variation with the high vowels /i/ and /u/ in this context (abób[o]ra ~ abób[u]ra; pêss[e]gu ~ pêss[i]gu). It indicates that the change to the three vowels symmetrical system /i a u/ is already foreseen in underlying level of the speech in Rio de Janeiro State. These results differ from the asymmetric system /i E a U/, defended by Câmara Jr (1970). Moreover, the complementation of the results with a questionnaire and a reading test was fundamental to find and analyze many proparoxytone words that did not appear in the sociolinguistic corpora. This step of research showed that the raising process, which is virtually categorical in spontaneous speech of people who reached up to primary education, is gradually inhibited depending on the level of education and speech monitoring, which does speakers recover the conservative variants [e] and even [o].