Análise sociofonética das vogais médias pretônicas do português de Vitória e Montanha, ES

Abstract

This study presents a sociophonetic analysis of pre-stressed mid vowels from Vitória and Montanha, cities in Espírito Santo. We compared the pre-stressed mid vowels from Vitória, Espírito Santo’s capital, and Montanha, a city at the north of Espírito Santo state, according to the theoretical assumptions of Acoustic Phonetics and Variationist Sociolinguistics, to help in the description of the Capixaba dialect. For this purpose, 16 informants were selected, eight from each city, stratified by sex/gender and by age group. The corpus was obtained from the presentation of figures inserted into the carrier sentence "Digo ______baixinho" and repeated five times by speaker. Using the plug-in Akustyk within Praat, we extracted the values of the first and second formants of the vowels – F1 and F2. Then, the values were submitted to the R programming language, in which analysis of variance – ANOVA – were run, in order to verify possible statistical differences between the pre-stressed mid vowels from Vitória and Montanha, in addition to the boxplot graphs comparing pairs of pre-stressed vowels of each city. Variational analysis of the data were also run, with the help of GoldVarb X, responsible for the statistical treatment of linguistic and social variables involved in the variation of prestressed vowels. As a result, we noticed, in relation to the values of F1 and F2, that the vowels of Vitória and Montanha were statistically different. Montanha presented pre-stressed vowels lower than Vitoria’s, which was expected because this city is located at the north of the state. In addition, the acoustic space of this city was shown to be more peripheral, with anterior vowels, [i], [e] and [e], more anteriorized and posterior vowels, [?], [o] and [u] more posteriorized than those of Vitória. On the analysis of relative weights, the factors that favored the realization of pre-stressed variant [e] in Vitória, were the stressed vowel, being [?] the most favorable, and the sex/gender, being the women who favored most. The stressed vowel [?] and the women also favored the realization of the variant [?] in Vitória. In Montanha, the factors that favored the realization of the pre-stressed variant [e] were the age group of 31-50 years, the words whose structures had a pre-stressed + a stressed + a unstressed, as in p[e]teca, and a first repetition of the group of words recorded. Finally, the realization of the pre-stressed vowel [?] from Montanha was favored by the stressed vowel [?], by the age group of 31-50 years and by the first repetition of the group of words.