As vogais pretônicas no falar popular de Fortaleza: uma abordagem variacionista

Abstract

Under the variationist perspective, mainly defended by Weinreich, Labov and Herzog (1968) and Labov (1972, 1994), this study approaches the variable realization of the medium pretonic vowels /e/ and /o/, in interconsonantal position, aiming at describing the variable behavior of the pre-stressed medium vowels in the popular variable of the Portuguese language spoken by the people from the city of Fortaleza. The choice of a phonic aspect for this study is mainly justified by the fact that the phonetic level is the one which immediately shows the social and regional differences; besides, the behavior of the medium pretonic vowels is one of the linguistic facts that permits the recognition of the various dialectal areas of the Portuguese language. The 72 participants in this research were equally stratified, according to gender, age and school level. The following factors were tested in this analysis: tonic vowel, following non-tonic vowel, distance in relation to the tonic, kind of non-tonic vowel, nasality, pre and post phonological context, type of syllable, morphological structure, gender, age and school level. The main hypothesis was that the pre-tonic would copy the pitch feature of the tonic vowel. The results reveal that the open variable vowels, the /e/ and the /o/, appear in a greater number than the closed and high ones. We confirmed the idea that this phenomenon is mainly led by the vocalic harmonization of the pre-tonic related to the height of the tonic one. However, there are other factors, either linguistic or extra-linguistic, that can either favor or not the variable rule. Some of these factors are: the pre and post consonant context, the type of unstressed vowels, the age and the school level. Thus, the pre-tonics variation is a systemic phenomenon, that is, it is basically conditioned by structural factors.