Enfraquecimento das fricativas sonoras na fala do Ceará

Abstract

This article deals with the weakening of the voiced fricative consonants of the Portuguese language Ceara, where /v/, /z/,and /ʒ/, as in ‘estava’, ‘desde’ e ‘já’, can be realized also as voiced glottal sound [ɦ] or erased. The sound, better classified as murmured (SCHUBIGER, 1977, p. 90; LADEFOGED, 1975, p. 129), belongs to a family of fricatives that has in Brazil members like [h], [χ], [ʁ], [x] and [ɣ], and is similar to the corresponding to /R/ spelt ‘rr’ or ‘r’ at the beginning of words. This weakening had not been investigated with well-defined criteria, although it had been approached by authors like Martinz de Aguiar (1937, p. 290), Silveira Bueno (1944, p. 22) and Serafim da Silva Neto (1979, p. 627), that showed its association to certain social classes and their stigmatization. The research was carried on in the urban area of Fortaleza, with 10 speakers from 10 to 42 years of age, having as objectives to determine the linguistics contexts and pragmatic conditioning and measure the level of stigmatization of the phenomenon by applying a test of linguistic attitudes to university level informers, with some Linguistic knowledge, that evaluated sentences and tried to characterize the speakers concerning schooling and social position in the occupational market. The data were submitted to the SWAMINCVARBRUL program (NARO; VOTRE, 1980) and demonstrated the most influent factors in the phenomenon were lexical and pragmatic ones, that the usuality is important to the weakening and that the most struck items are the grammatical morphemes, being more resistent those items with more informational relevance and less use. It was also noticed that the smallest formality and the less monitored speech favor the “heização” and the erasing, that the larger usuality of an item seems to make easier the acceptance of its weakening.