O alteamento vocálico /o/~[u] em posição pretônica na zona rural do município de Baião Pará

Abstract

The present work deals with the phenomenon of vowel heightening of the upper middle posterior /o/ in pretonic position in Portuguese spoken in the rural area of the municipality of Baião-PA, Brazil. It aims to analyze the role of linguistic and social factors (gender, age and formal education) in motivating the variable behavior of /o/ ~ [u]. The corpus involves a sample of 12 participants, stratified by: age group (15 to 25 years of age, 25 to 45 years, and over 46); gender (male and female); and schooling (elementary and higher education). From the 12 speakers, we obtained a total of 400 speech data, which were treated in Goldvarb X, and analyzed according to the theoretical and methodological assumptions of Variationist Sociolinguistics (Weinreich; Labov; Herzog, 2006). The results showed the heightening of /o/ as the variant of least occurrence, with low frequency of use, 33% and relative weight 0.32, and maintenance of /o/ como [o] as a variant of greater occurrence, 67% of percentage and 0.63 of relative weight. We also observed that pretonic /o/ is more likely to rise to [u] when: a) before an immediate high vowel /i, u/, with a relative weight of 0.92; b) preceded by bilabial consonants, 0.64; c) in words with a suffix without a high vowel, relative weight of 0.51; d) in nouns 0.56; and e) immediately preceded by stressed syllables (distance 1), relative weight of 0.61. In relation to the social traits of the speakers, the phenomenon of heightening showed greater recursion in the speech of men, with 0.58 of relative weight; speakers elementary- school level of education, 0.68, and over 46 years of age, 0.63 relative weight. We concluded that the linguistic variation /o/ ~ [u], although it is frequent and stratified, is not the most frequent variant in the speech of the residents of the rural area of Baião.