Abstract
This paper addresses the acoustic realisations of the pretonic vowels /e, o/ that have been previously reported to undergo regressive vowel harmony in Brazilian Portuguese. It examines how the height of pretonic /e, o/ is affected by the phonological and phonetic height of the adjacent stressed vowel in three dialects: Northeastern (Bahia), Northern (Amazonas) and Southern (Rio Grande do Sul). A pseudoword reading task was performed with two speakers each of the three different dialects. The findings suggest that there is some kind of low harmony, in that /e, o/ are realized with markedly higher F1 before the stressed low vowels /ɛ, a, ɔ/ than before the stressed non-low vowels /i, e, o, u/. This effect was found for all dialects, but appears to be categorical (and thus phonological) for the Northern and Northeastern speakers, while gradient for the Southern speakers, where it is likely due to phonetic V-to-V coarticulation. More importantly, no effect of height harmony was found in any of the dialects: pretonic /e, o/ were not produced significantly higher before a stressed /i, u/. In addition, Northern and Southern speakers showed V-to-V coarticulation for the non-high pretonic vowels, illustrating with Northern speakers that a categorical harmony process can co-occur together with a gradient vowel assimilation in the same dialect.
Highlights
Brazilian Portuguese (BP) has a seven-vowel system organized in terms of frontness, backness, and height, where all back vowels are rounded
We studied the acoustic realizations of the pretonic vowels /e, o/ in three dialects of Brazilian Portuguese, namely Northeastern, Northern and Southern, by examining the production of non-words by two speakers of each variety
These pretonic mid-high vowels in Brazilian Portuguese have been traditionally described as undergoing two types of vowel harmony: A raising process caused by following stressed high vowels /i, u/, reported to be present in all dialects of the language, and a lowering process caused by the following stressed low vowels /ɛ, a, ɔ/, that has been portrayed as dialect-specific
Summary
Brazilian Portuguese (BP) has a seven-vowel system organized in terms of frontness, backness, and height, where all back vowels are rounded. The output of this neutralization is a mid-high vowel, as the alternations in (1) illustrate (adapated from Kenstowicz & Sandalo 2016: 2). The pretonic vowels in BP are affected by Vowel Harmony (: VH) This was first noted by Silveira (as cited in Camara Jr. 1970), who observed that /e/ and /o/ are realized as [i] and [u] respectively, when they are followed by a high vowel /i/ or /u/ in the adjacent stressed syllable. Silveira argues that vowel height harmony is a remnant of an earlier process that dates back to the 15th and 16th centuries (Naro 1971)
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