Uma visão multirrepresentacional dos padrões silábicos emergentes do português brasileiro

Abstract

This study aims to analyze Emerging Syllable Patterns (ESP) in heterosyllabic contexts in Brazilian Portuguese (BP). Our research question is: what are the factors associated with the emergence of heterosyllabic ESP in BP? As a hypothesis, we believe that ESP in BP emerge from the epenthetic vowel gradient elision culminating in its categorical non-realization, which is influenced by variables such as syllabic type, voicing, and individual. This research is based on a view of language as a Complex Adaptive System (CAS) (BECKNER et al, 2009) and the multi-representational phonologic models (BYBEE, 2001). This is a quasi-experimental and quantitative research, with the data undergoing acoustic and statistical analyses. Among the main results, it was observed that (1) syllabic types influence distinctively ESP emergence, (2) voiceless clusters work as ESP attractors, (3), the epenthetic vowel’s length is not associated with its higher or lower rates of categorical emergence, (4) the epenthetic vowel has shorter length compared to the full vowel, as well as (5) the preference for ESP realization (71%) among the informants.