The coda in Santomean (PST) and Principense (PP) Portuguese: general aspects and deletion processes

• Autor(a) principal: Balduino, Amanda Macedo
• Data de Publicação: 2020
• Outros Autores: Vieira, Nancy Mendes Torres, Freitas, Shirley
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Revista da ABRALIN (Online)
• Texto Completo: https://revista.abralin.org/index.php/abralin/article/view/1690
• topic: Português; São Tomé e Príncipe; Sílaba; Coda; Apagamento; Portuguese; Sao Tome and Principe; Syllable; Coda; Deletion

The goal of this paper is to describe the coda in Santomean (PST) and Principean (PP) Portuguese, varieties of Portuguese spoken in São Tomé and Príncipe. Thus, we aim to detect the segments licensed in coda and analyze deletion processes. Based on a corpus with 20 spontaneous speech interviews, we performed acoustic and quantitative analysis, applying a logistic regression test to examine linguistic variables relevant to the coda deletion. We verified that the coda, in PST and PP, can be filled by a rhotic, a sibilant, a lateral and an underspecified nasal (BALDUINO, 2018), with multiple phonetic productions of these phonological segments - as in Brazilian and in European Portuguese (CÂMARA JR., 1970; MATEUS; D’ANDRADE, 2000). Focusing on /r, S, l/, we detected the presence of some phonological processes with the coda as domain: segmental deletion, velarization and vocalization, the last two processes with /l/ as target. Such phenomena, besides justifying a hierarchical syllable structure in PST and PP, suggest that the coda is a fragile position within the syllable, being prone to deletions and structural changes (SELKIRK, 1982) which result into a CV structure. The data also indicate that, due to (i) different proportions of coda deletion among /r, S, l/; (ii) distinct variables selected by the statistical test and (iii) different processes that individually affect each consonant analyzed, the weakness of the coda varies according to each segment.