29.1390, Diss: Portuguese; Phonetics; Phonology: Magnun Rochel Madruga: ''The Phonetics and Phonology of Brazilian Portuguese [ATR] Harmony''

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-29-1390. Thu Mar 29 2018. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 29.1390, Diss: Portuguese; Phonetics; Phonology: Magnun Rochel Madruga: ''The Phonetics and Phonology of Brazilian Portuguese [ATR] Harmony''

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Date: Thu, 29 Mar 2018 10:59:17
From: Magnun Madruga [magnun.rochel at gmail.com]
Subject: The Phonetics and Phonology of Brazilian Portuguese [ATR] Harmony

 
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(s):
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.




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