Syncope of non-final posttonic vowels in the interior of Paraná: an autosegmental and variational analysis from ALiB data

Abstract

In this paper, we seek to describe and analyze the phenomenon of the syncope of the posttonic vowel in non-final position in the speech in the interior of Paraná, based on data collected in interviews conducted by the project Linguistic Atlas of Brazil (ALiB), in sixteen points of inquiry located in the interior of Parana, with a total of 64 informants. Thereby, we evaluate the frequency and possible linguistic and extralinguistic factors that can condition syncope / maintenance of non-final posttonic vowel of proparoxytones in eleven lexical items: lâmpada (light bulb), elétrico (electric), fósforo (match), pólvora (gunpower), abóbora (pumpkin), árvore (tree), sábado (Saturday), número (number), fígado (liver), vômito (vomit), hóspede (guest) that are part of the Phonetic-Phonological Questionnaire (QFF in Portuguese) of the ALiB Questionnaire (ALiB PROJECT NATIONAL COMMITTEE, 2001). The investigation is based on the perspective of Pluridimensional Dialectology (THUN, 1998) and in light of the autosegmental phonological model for the syllable, in analysis of the syllabic pattern of Brazilian Portuguese (COLLISCHONN, 1996; BISOL, 1999). We found out that the phonological context of the posttonic vowels and adjacent segments may interfere in the conditioning of the syncope, while the extralinguistic variables are not productive for this process in our corpus.