Apagamento de vogais pretônicas no POBH - norma culta

Abstract

This work investigates the variable rule of pretonic vowel deletion in lexical items (without clitics), observed in the corpus of POBH (Brazilian Portuguese of Belo Horizonte). It aims at identifying the social and structural factors related to the incidence of the phenomenon in the speech of the community of Belo Horizonte/MG. The research was developed according to the Labovian Sociolinguistics perspective, and also to the Phonological Processes Theory.The following variants of the rule are analyzed: deletion of unstressed pretonic vowel in word-initial position, apheresis, and deletion of unstressed pretonic vowel within word, syncope. The phenomenon was investigated using a data sample of 6386 pretonic syllables, collected from the formal speech of twelve native informants of the city of Belo Horizonte; this corpus was then subjected to acoustic and statistical analysis in order to check for the existence of a variable rule of pretonic vowel deletion in POBH. The probable social factors that may influence the process are: age and gender; with regard to structural factors, the linguistic variables include: nature of the dependent variable,preceding context, onset voicing, following context, stressed syllable distance, word structure, and item function. There are also internal variables specifically related to the cases of vowel deletion, which are: informant, repeated items, type of deletion, deletion bias, and coda specification. At first, it has been considered the hypothesis of prosodic elements, rather than phonological ones, influencing pretonic vowel cancellation. Then, knowing the social, linguistic and internal independent variables correlated to the process, it was possible tounderstand the application of the variable rule, the frequency of cases, and then confirm whether or not the dialect of Belo Horizonte can be characterized by the deletion of unstressed pretonic vowels, as observed in postonic context.