A variação das vogais médias pretônicas na cidade mineira de Machacalis

Abstract

This research describes and analyses the pretonic mid vowels /e/ and /o/ in the city of Machacalis, Minas Gerais State, Brazil. Three variants of pretonic mid vowels were described and analyzed according to the Variation and Change Theory: [e] and [o]: half-closed production; [E] and [O]: half-open production; [i] and [u]: raising production. The corpus consisted of 13,748 pretonic mid vowels tokens, taken from interviews with 16 informants stratified by gender, age and region. Beside these social factors, the following linguistic factors were taken into account:syllabic type, vowel of the stressed syllable, vowel between the vowel of the variable and the stressed one, type of the morpheme where the vowel is located, paradigm with half-open vowel, distance from the stressed syllable, morphological class, manner of articulation of the precedingsegment, place of articulation of the preceding segment, manner of articulation of the next segment, place of articulation of the next segment, distance from the beginning of the word, number of syllables of the word, and lexical item. The data were submitted to the multinomial logistic model from the SPSS software. The database created for this research will help in the description and analysis of the Brazilian Portuguese (BP) and especially of the dialects of Minas Gerais State.