Abstract

CARVALHO, Maria José. On the origins of unstressed [u] in contemporary European Portuguese: variation, change and socio-cognitive dimensions. Diacrítica [online]. 2015, vol.29, n.1, pp.171-231. ISSN 0807-8967.

The aim of this study is to determine the value of unstressed /o/ in mid and final position, in a corpus of medieval Portuguese documents from the central-coastal region of the country. We argue that, within the word, the consonantal context is more important in the change [o] > [u] than the vowel context, mentioned by Herculano de Carvalho. We will show that in this context the realization [u] of European Portuguese goes back to the 13th century, having proceeded gradually within the language, according to phoneme combinations, and that awareness of this change would have begun at the end of the 14th century, well before the 18th-century testimony of Luís Caetano de Lima. Through abundant evidence showing the closure (and sometimes the loss of this vowel), or even examples of graphical hypercorrection, we will try to show that, in the region of study, this change must have spread around the second quarter of the 15th century, making way for linguistic drift from the middle of this century. Finally we stress the importance of historical research in studies of cognitive linguistics, especially those on the learning of the Portuguese orthographic system by primary school children.

Keywords : History of unstressed vowels; Vocalic elevation; Cognition and linguistic change; Sociocognitive linguistics; Linguistic change and standardization.

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