A Phonological approach to non-final post-tonic mid-vowels

• Autor(a) principal: Santana, Arthur Pereira
• Data de Publicação: 2016
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Domínios de Lingu@gem
• Texto Completo: https://seer.ufu.br/index.php/dominiosdelinguagem/article/view/32021
• topic: Neutralização; Vogais médias; Postônica não-final; Neutralization; Mid-vowels; Non-final post-tonic

This article discusses mid-vowels in non-final post-tonic position in Brazilian Portuguese, specifically, the phonological motivation for the emergence of high vowels and, in dialects that allows it, mid-low vowels in the referred position. Thus, we carried out a controlled experiment with 40 individuals from two Brazilian capitals, São Paulo (Southern dialect) and São Luís (northern dialect), which resulted in a balanced corpus of 4720 tokens. After statistical analysis, it was observed the correlation of the form that emerged in non-final post-tonic position with the final unstressed vowel. Assuming the Feature Geometry framework (CLEMENTS, 1985) and Wetzel’s (2011) proposal for neutralization as a mechanism of feature change, we propose two phonological rules: (i) one for the emergence of high vowels, as a result of vocalic node spreading from the final unstressed vowel to the non-final post-tonic vowel; (ii) and a second rule for the emergence of low-mid vowels resulting from [+open3] spreading, also from the unstressed final position to the non-final post-tonic position.