Variation and change in the rhotics of brazilian portuguese

Abstract

The main objective of this dissertation is to describe the current state and classhood of rhotics in the Minas Gerais variety of Brazilian Portuguese (BP), explore the factors behind sound change, and discuss the direction of change. The hypothesis is that changes in various subsystems of the language contribute to a general sound change trajectory, which takes place mostly through articulatory reduction and retiming in frequently used words and constructions (as predictedby Exemplar Models). Language is seen as a Complex Adaptive System that consists of several subsystems, all of which undergo change and can contribute simultaneously to gradual changes in the overall system.Semi-structured interviews and a sentence completion task with 14 speakers from southwestern Minas Gerais yielded a total of 7,765 contexts for rhotics. The rhotics of BP were found to include trills, taps, fricatives, approximants and aspirated approximants in alveolar, palatal, retroflex/bunched, uvular, and glottal places of articulation. Deletions also form a considerable part of the data. BP rhotics have followed two diverging lenition trajectories: one anterior (alveo-palatal) and one posterior (uvular and glottal). Both trajectories can ultimately lead to deletion. Factors that promote lenition include post-tonic position, adjacency to the voiceless fricative [s] and/or the high vowels [i I u U],and coda position which involves more lenited r-variants and deletion than any other context. Once sound change begins to generalize in these attractors, it can also spread to other r-contexts.BP rhotics are best modelled as a network of language-specific family relationships, in which chains of articulatory reductions and retimings establish diachronic connections between synchronically distant variants. As a class, rhotics are featurally, articulatorily, and phonetically unspecified, and phonetic overlap between contexts makes the contrast between r-variants incomplete. For this reason, the phonological representation of rhotics consists of fuzzy positional categories that encompass a variety of phonetic forms and that are constantly updated through language use.