Alçamento da vogal média pré-tônica sem motivação aparente em Porto Alegre-RS : léxico e variação

Abstract

This study aims at analyzing the conditioning of application of the raising of pretonic midvowels in porto-alegrense speech. Three samples of speech from VARSUL database were considered, they were collected between 1988 and 2009, compounded by adults, men and women with school level between elementary and college degree. From 6.468 tokens of vowel /o/ and 7.190 tokens of vowel /e/, it was noticed that back mid-vowel undergoes more to the studied process than front mid-vowel, although both vowels present low rates of applying the raising. The time difference between collecting the samples pointed to the regression of using the raising in the researched community. By the use of the tool Rbrul, the statistical results show that the raising in analysis is frequently focused in few lexical itens which share, to vowel /o/ the contexts of nasalized vowel, velar and labial consonants in the precedent position and nasal consonants in the following position and to vowel /e/, the contexts of beginning of word, affricate and front coronal consonants in the precedent position and velar and palatal in the following position. These results confirm those found in previous works (KLUNCK, 2007 and CRUZ, 2010). The investigation concerning frequency in Portuguese language (consulted in corpora Corpus Brasileiro e ASPA) of words from these samples indicated that more frequent words present more SMA (raising) phonetically motivated, which is in agreement with the hypothesis of Frequency-Implementation (PHILLIPS, 2001).