LINGUIST List 29.1390
Thu Mar 29 2018
Diss: Portuguese; Phonetics; Phonology: Magnun Rochel Madruga: ''The Phonetics and Phonology of Brazilian Portuguese [ATR] Harmony''
Editor for this issue: Sarah Robinson <srobinsonlinguistlist.org>
Date: 28-Mar-2018
From: Magnun Madruga <magnun.rochel
gmail.com>
Subject: The Phonetics and Phonology of Brazilian Portuguese [ATR]
Harmony
E-mail this
message to a friend Institution: Universidade Estadual de Campinas
Program: Linguistics
Dissertation Status: Completed
Degree Date: 2017
Author: Magnun Rochel Madruga
Dissertation Title: The Phonetics
and Phonology of Brazilian Portuguese [ATR] Harmony
Dissertation URL:
http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/003953
Linguistic Field(s): Phonetics
Phonology
Subject Language(s):
Portuguese
(por) Dissertation Director:
Silke Hamann
Maria Bernadete
Marques Abaurre
Dissertation Abstract:
This study analyzes
pre-stressed vowels that undergo vowel harmony in Brazilian Portuguese. Based on the
analysis of the Gaucho and Baiano dialects, this work provides an acoustic
description of pre-stressed and stressed vowels involved in vowel harmony. This
subject is relevant because of the limited amount of acoustic-phonetic studies of
this phenomenon in the literature, particularly of the role of low vowels in
triggering vowel harmony, as well as the role of adjacent consonants. This study
investigates the harmony patterns found by Abaurre-Gnerre (1981), a phenomenon which
is hypothesized in this research as a process of harmony governed by the feature
[ATR]. For this purpose, we developed a reading experiment with six participants (3
men and 3 women) from each dialect. The acoustic-phonetic analysis of the vowels was
based on the measurements of the first and second formants (F1 and F2) of the
pre-stressed and stressed vowels. From the acoustic description of the whole set of
Brazilian Portuguese vowels, we found that the vowel harmony targets /e/ and /o/ are
affected primarily by the low vowels /ɛ, a, ɔ/, which can be considered the
triggers. From the experimental results, we developed a method called Vowel
Threshold, which is based on measurements of F1 and F2 to estimate thresholds of
vowel categories in the acoustic space and therefore map the movements of raising,
lowering, vowel-fronting and vowel-backing in vowel production. This method reduces
the values of F1 and F2 to a scale that has zero as the reference point, which would
be considered the expected value for the token of a vowel if there were no biases
introduced by the V-to-V coarticulation, by the intervening consonants or other
process related to speech. With this measurement, a critical value is stipulated to
determine whether a vowel has undergone intra-category or inter-category movements.
The results of the analysis of the Vowel Threshold measurements showed that the
vowels /e, o/ of all subjects do not tend to be raised to [i, u], rather they are
lowered to [ɛ, ɔ] by speakers of both the Gaucho and Baiano dialects. Moreover, the
experimental results show that: (1) the preceding consonants have no effect of
lowering or raising in the vowels /e, o/; (2) the intervening sounding consonants
are transparent to the lowering in the two dialects, while the obstruents appear to
be opaque in the Gaucho dialect; (3) there is a dissimilatory process in Baiano that
does not seem to be a disharmony, but indicates a tendency for intra-category
lowering, motivated by the disagreement in [back] of the target and the trigger. The
work also presents a re-analysis of the Bisol (1981) and Barbosa da Silva (1989)
corpora in order to examine the process of [+high] harmony verified by those authors
to discuss the supremacy of this sort of harmony in Brazilian Portuguese in contrast
with the experimental results found in this work. Finally, this study shows that the
BP [ATR] harmony seems to be the active harmony in Brazilian Portuguese; and as
evidence for this, arguments from phonology-morphology interaction, vowel
contrastiveness, secondary stress assignment, and orthography biasing in the
analysis of vowel harmony are brought into the discussion. It is argued that there
is a consonantal blocking effect of [+high] harmony motivated by certain preceding
consonants to the target vowels. Evidence of [+high] harmony avoidance is also found
in the sociolinguistic literature that shows a decreasing application of such
harmonization according to the age and education of the speakers.
Page Updated: 29-Mar-2018