Preliminary study on /s/ debucalization in a speech community from Rio Grande do Norte - Brazil

Abstract

This paper aims to describe the linguistic and social factors that govern the variation between alveolar and glottal forms of post-vocalic fricative /S/ in the speech of São José de Mipibu City, located in the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Norte. The analysis is based on the theoretical assumptions of Sociolinguistics (Weinreich, Labov; Herzog, 2006 [1968]; Labov, 2008 [1972]; 1994; 2001) and Autosegmental Phonology (Goldsmith, 1990), specifically on Feature Geometry (Clements; Hume, 1995). The set of data analyzed comes from the project Description of Natural Languages – Portuguese: variant forms of the archiphoneme /S/ in the potiguar speech community. Data on alveolar and glottal realizations of /S/ were subjected to logistic regression models built on the R platform, in order to explain the most productive variables for the analysis of the phenomenon. The results demonstrated that glottal articulation of /S/ is favored by adjacent segments with the feature [+sonorant], in the position of a stressed syllable and in the final syllable of a word in front of a consonant (pattern /V__#C/). There is also evidence that posteriorization may be more productive in the speech of individuals with lower levels of education, in accordance with what the literature already identifies in the description of other communities.