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Acento secundário e epêntese vocálica no português do sul do Brasil

2015; Editora da Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul (EDIPUCRS); Volume: 7; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.15448/1984-4301.2014.2.17629

1984-4301

Evellyne Sousa Costa, Tatiana Keller,

Digital Communication and Language

The fact that secondary stress occurs in pretonic syllables, one of the most favorable contexts for vowel epenthesis in Brazilian Portuguese, as pointed by sociolinguistics analysis, such as Collischonn (2002), and the observation that epenthesis creates a new syllable in this position seems to indicate that there may be correlation between this phenomenon and this type of stress. Collischonn (1994) and Moraes (2003) identify two trends in relation to the secondary stress attribution in Portuguese: initial prominence and binary alternation between strong and weak syllables. When a word has an even number of pretonic syllables these two trends can be met simultaneously; the same does not occur when the number of syllables is odd. In this paper, we investigate the possibility to occur more vowel epenthesis in words with an odd number of pretonic syllables to meet these two trends and also analyze the location of secondary stress in words with an odd number of pretonic syllables with and without vowel insertion. The sample consists of 8 interviews, belonging to the VARSUL database, with higher educated male and female subjects from Porto Alegre below 50 years old and over 50 years old.