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| Author(s): |
Angela Satomi Kajita
Total Authors: 1
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| Document type: | Master's Dissertation |
| Press: | Campinas, SP. |
| Institution: | Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem |
| Defense date: | 2009-02-20 |
| Examining board members: |
Maria Filomena Spatti Sândalo;
Charlotte Galves;
Manoel Mourivaldo Santiago Almeida
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| Advisor: | Maria Filomena Spatti Sândalo |
| Abstract | |
Studies on Historical Linguistics show that old texts are not only useful for analyzing the written form of a given language, but also for portraying some phonological aspects, which are typically only associated with spoken language. In fact, the phonological information that can be obtained from a written text - old or modern - ranges from pronunciation characteristics to rhythmic pattern; and if the text was written by a semi-illiterate subject (also called inept hand), these characteristics are even more likely to be found. The present work focuses on the rhythmic aspects of the writings of semi-illiterate Portuguese adults from the 17th and 18th century, which were selected from the Lisbon Inquisition archives. By observing the unconventional orthographic segmentation in these texts, one can see that it is not a matter of randomness; instead, the subjects seem to have used well-defined criteria as to where they should join or separate elements. Thus the hyposegmentations (i.e. the omission of white space between separated elements) and hypersegmentations (i.e. de insertion of white space between joined elements) seem to be semantically or phonologically motivated. Assuming that the unconventional segmentations can be related to rhythmic aspects of the language, this work's proposal is to study the writings of some inept hands in search of signs that can point to a possible stress pattern of the spoken language. The analyzed texts from the first half of the 18th century show that the binary stress pattern - a trait of modern Brazilian Portuguese - becomes less frequent throughout time in the collected data, which possibly indicates a rhythmic change undergone by the language during the transition to modern European Portuguese. Although not conclusive, the results suggest that the change in the unconventional segmentation pattern can be related to the rhythmic pattern change of European Portuguese (AU) | |