Abstract

GOMES, Christina Abreu; MESQUITA, Cássia  and  FAGUNDES, Taís da Silva. Revisiting the variation between final unstressed nasal diphthong and oral vowels in the speech community of rio de janeiro. Diacrítica [online]. 2013, vol.27, n.1, pp.153-173. ISSN 0807-8967.

This work revisits the variation between final unstressed nasal diphthongs and final oral vowels in Brazilian Portuguese in order to verify the role of the lexical item and that of the structural contexts based on data from a spoken sample of the speech community of Rio de Janeiro according to the Variationist and Usage-based Approaches. The results are from a pilot study with 12 speakers from Censo 2000 sample. The statistical analysis with Rbrul revealed the effect of lexical item and prosodic constraint. The distribution of the variants by age groups indicates a situation of stable variation. However, it is possible to identify the implementation of the oral vowel variant when the behavior of specific lexical items is observed.

Keywords : sound change; lexical item; nasal diphtong.

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