About the distribution of coronal mid vowels in Brazilian

About the distribution of coronal mid vowels in Brazilian Portuguese
– a case of Agreement
Ana Ruth Miranda & Carmen Lúcia Matzenauer,
U.F. Pelotas & U.C. Pelotas
[email protected], [email protected]
Considering the predictable occurrence of the labial mid vowel in stressed syllables of
Portuguese noun forms, as a consequence of the phenomenon known as Nominal Metaphony,
this paper presents a study about a possible predictable distribution of coronal mid vowels in
stressed syllables of noun forms of the language as well. The portuguese Nominal
Metaphony, studied by many authors, such as Cavacas (1920), Silva Neto (1970), Câmara Jr.
(1975), Mateus (1975), Andrade (1994), and Cafezeiro (1981), among others, is defined,
according to Miranda (2000), as a lexical rule that is applied at the word level and causes the
alternation between labial mid vowels in the root, when the trigger – the theme labial vowel –
is in the word boundary, e.g., p[o]rco, p[ç]rca; n[o]vo, n[ç]va. This phenomenon, which
implies the predictable presence of a labial-high mid vowel in the stressed syllable of noun
forms and which is productive in the language until today, according to these authors, has also
occurred diachronically with the coronal mid vowels. The present research showed that
Portuguese presents a kind of constraint, besides the [o]…[o] sequence identified as Nominal
Metaphony, that conditions other vowel sequence, which can make a coronal mid vowel in
the stress syllable of a root noun predictable. This conclusion is derived from results obtained
in an experimental study conducted in order to test the psychological reality of a sequence
with coronal vowels in root nouns with the vowel -a as the theme vowel. The test was applied
to thirty native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese, in two different schooling levels and age
groups. These empirical data, as well as a survey carried out in the lexicon of the language,
considering only primitive forms of nouns with -a as the theme vowel, were analyzed in a
constraint-based approach. The ranking of constraints, as proposed by the Optimality Theory
– specially interactions of faithfulness constraints of the IDENT[F] family (Kager, 1999;
McCarthy, 2002), and markedness constraints of the AGREE family (Rose and Walker, 2004)
–, was capable of accounting for the occurrence of the sequence of vowels under investigation
and the alternations found among high and low coronal mid vowels in the nouns of the
language. To sum up, we can say that the OT analysis supported our claim that there is a
possible predictable distribution of coronal mid vowels in the root of noun forms in Brazilian
Portuguese.
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