A função e o comportamento do traço nasal em yaathe, língua indígena brasileira

Abstract

In this work, we intend to describe the behavior and function of the nasal feature in the Yaathe indigenous language, spoken by the Fulni-ô Indians, whose village is located in Águas Belas, Pernambuco, Brazil. The data used come from two different sources: one part belongs to the Documentation Project of the Brazilian Indigenous Language Yaathe (Fulni-ô), collected between 2011 and 2013; another part are elicited data collected in 2016, at the Federal University of Alagoas, to this investigation. We use as a basis the works on the language of Costa (1999), Cabral (2009) and Silva (2011; 2016). For the description of the data, we start with the classical structural theories. To better explain the attested phenomena, we rely on the Autossegmental Theory proposed by Goldsmith (1976) and on the Prosodic Phonology of Nespor and Vogel (1986). This work is organized in three sections: in the first section, we make an explanation about the Fulni-ô people and language, which are much more ethnographic informations, as well as pointing to the research objectives; in the second section, we approached the theoretical contribution used in our research; in the last section, we describe and analyze the data, observing the occurrence of the nasal feature in the language, in order to verify its function in terms of distinctiveness, as well as its behavior in relation to the application of the described phonological rules. We can observe that nasalization, in previous works, was only considered phonetic, caused by phonological rules. In the data that we analyzed we find cases in which the nasalization of the vowel occurs without being able to attest the application of rules from the synchronous point of view. This allows us to raise some hypotheses about the derivation of nasal vowels, based on alternations, mainly, and to propose that some of these vowels should be considered phonemes.