Processos de palatalização das oclusivas alveolares em Maceió

Abstract

This work aims to investigate the phonetic/phonological processes of palatalization of the alveolar stop produced in Brazilian Portuguese speaked in Maceió in the Variationist Sociolinguistics perspective (LABOV, 2008 [1972]), comparing linguistic data collected with external variables (age, sex and schooling), and internal variables ( previous context, following context, accent, word size, voicing and lexical border), aiming to identify possible conditionings of use of the linguistic variants. In this way, this research intends to analyze processes of palatalization considering the most productive contexts, the regressive, quite common in the communities of Brazil’s South and Southeastern as words of type “[]ia” e “den[]e”, and the progressive, current, so far, in some localities of the Northeast (SANTOS, 1996; MOTA; ROLEMBERG, 1997; HENRIQUE, HORA, 2012). In this city, the use of progressive palatalization is recurrent, in which the phonological element that allows the process is in a precedent position to the alveolar stop, as in words like “pei[]o”, “doi[]o” e “gos[]o” and are mainly conditioned by the collaborator's schooling. To this end, I will use as a theoretical framework the geometry autossegmental perspective of phonological traits from Clements, (1999 [1985]) and Clements & Hume (1996), from which I will present a logical proposal of palatalization analysis held in that speech community. It is assumed in this way, that the distinctive phonological traits are organized in a hierarchy that can be represented by a tree that obeys a specific criterion of constriction. Thus, from the hypothetical-deductive method, I defend the hypothesis of phonological traits as triggers of this process, authorizing a palatalization of alveolar.