A study on nasal vowel in BP in a position favorable to the ocurrence of external vowel sandhi

• Grant number: 24/05499-8
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Start date: September 01, 2024
• End date: December 31, 2025
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics - Linguistic Theory and Analysis
• Principal Investigator: Maria Filomena Spatti Sandalo
• Grantee: Victor Teixeira Turatti
• Host Institution: Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem (IEL). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The present study seeks to investigate the statue of nasal vowels in Portuguese, a topic that raises discussions between two main current hypotheses, the biphonemic hypothesis (CÂMARA JR., 1970; CAGLIARI, 1977; DUARTE & TEIXEIRA, 1979; LOPEZ, 1979; MATEUS & D'ANDRADE, 2000; BISOL 2002; and BATTISTI, 2014) and the monophonemic hypothesis (LÜDTKE, 1953; LEITE, 1974 apud CALLOU & LEITE, 1990; and MARQUES & SCARBOROUGH, 2020). To this end, we intend to carry out an experiment testing the occurrence of external vowel sandhi between nasal vowels, since one of Câmara Jr.'s (1970) main arguments in favor of the biphonemic hypothesis is that sandhi would be blocked due to the biphonemic structure / VN/ of nasal vowels. Thus, the study will involve the participation of 12 participants to determine the duration of each of the nasal vowels (an important procedure to determine whether or not there was sandi) and 12 people to read, in 2 batteries, 20 neutral declarative sentences containing nasal and oral vowels in a favorable position for sandhi. The result of the experiments will be modeled in the MaxEnt Grammar Tool (HAYES et al., 2009), within the theoretical framework of Maximum Entropy Grammar (GOLDWATER & JOHNSON, 2003), also counting on an acoustic analysis in the PRAAT tool (BOERSMA & WEENINK, 2022) and with statistical analysis in R.