Production of high vowels in final postonic syllables in the popular talk of fortalezenses

• Autor(a) principal: Lima Júnior, Ronaldo Mangueira
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Outros Autores: Araujo, Francisco Alerrandro da Silva
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Cadernos de Estudos Linguísticos
• Texto Completo: https://periodicos.sbu.unicamp.br/ojs/index.php/cel/article/view/8665661
• topic: Reducción vocálica; Vocales; Variación lingüística; Redução vocálica; Vogais; Variação linguística; Linguistic variation; Vowels; Vowel reduction

The goal of this study was to analyze the production of the vowels /i/ and /u/ in final post-tonic syllables in the popular speech of Fortaleza, in order to investigate social and linguistic variables that could account for the deletion of such vowels. The data used for the analyses were taken from the Oral Norm of Popular Portuguese of Fortaleza-CE (NORPOFOR) database. The predictor variables investigated were: age group, educational level, gender/sex, stressed syllable vowel, preceding consonant, number of syllables and word frequency; and the response variable was presence/absence of the final vowel. A total of 976 words, 398 ending in syllable-final unstressed /i/ and 398 in /u/, were inspected in 16 recordings of the Dialogue between Informant and Documenter (DID) type (an informal interview lasting 1 hour on average). The words were analyzed acoustically in order to classify the production of the final vowel, and the data were used to fit a Bayesian mixed-effects logistic regression models. There were more deletions than productions of the vowels, and there were more deletions of /i/ than /u/. None of the social variables (age, education and sex) was significant. The number of syllables (longer words had more deletions) as well as the nature of the preceding consonant (unvoiced fricative or affricate) were relevant to explain and predict vowel deletion.