O alçamento das vogais médias pretônicas: um estudo do falar Ituiutabano

Abstract

The research aimed to describe raising of pretonic mid vowels in Ituiutaba-MG speech. We use the Labovian methodology which gave us needful base to investigate and systematize the variation of a linguistic community. The corpus was composed 2143 instances of pretonic mid vowels (1514 realizations of the vowel /e/ and 629 of the vowel /o/). These vowels were analyzed in nouns with structures CV, CVC and CVN from 24 interviews realized. The informants of the study were stratified by gender, age and educational level. They must be born in an urban area or they must have arrived in this are until five years old. In addition, the extra-linguistic variables (gender, age and educational level), we established as linguistic variables: distance from the stressed vowel, syllable type that occurs the pretonic mid vowel (open, closed), the preceding vowel to pretonic mid vowel, the vowel of the stressed syllable, preceding phonological context place of articulation (labial, coronal, dorsal) and manner of articulation (continuous and not continuous), and nasality. After statistical analysis computed by the Goldvarb software, the favoring contexts to the raising of /e/ were: high vowel in the stressed syllable, not continuous consonants in the following context, dorsal consonants in the following context, pretonic mid vowel in initial syllable, labial consonants in the preceding context and distance 1 from the stressed syllable. The contexts favored the raising of /o/ were: open syllable, high mid vowel and low vowel in stressed syllable, pretonic mid vowel in the initial syllable, distance 1 from stressed syllable, no continuous consonants in preceding context, coronal and labial consonants in preceding context and labial consonant in the following context. The extra-linguistic variables were not favoring to raising of pretonic mid vowels because the phenomenon was not stigmatized among individuals.