As vogais médias pretônicas nas capitais da região norte do Brasil

Abstract

This dissertation aims to describe the behavior of the middle unstressed vowels <e> <o> based on informants speech of six capitals of northern Brazil, namely: Belém (PA), Manaus (AM), Rio Branco (AC) , Macapa (AP), Porto Velho (RO) and Boa Vista (RR). The research is justified by the importance of describing the variety of Brazilian Portuguese spoken in the Brazilian Amazon and for contributing to linguistic description of the Brazilian Portuguese (BP). We used data from the phoneticphonological (QFF) and lexical-semantic questionnaires (QSL), instruments of data collection of the Linguistic Atlas of Brazil (ALiB). The data were transcribed with the use of Transcriber and then subjected to the use of the variable rule program VARBRUL which provided the relative weights useful for the analysis and variationist linguistic reflection. The groups of established factors for the description and linguistic analysis of the behavior of middle back unstressed vowels were the following: the nature of the stressed vowel, the distance between the stressed and unstressed vowel, the unstressed onset segment, the following syllable onset segment , gender, education , age and origin of the informant. Variants [i], [e] and [ɛ] were found to variable <e>. To <o> we found [u] [o] and [ɔ].The outcomes show [e] and [o] as the most frequent variants in the speech of northern Brazil.