O rotacismo na fala do noroeste paulista: uma análise sociolinguística

Abstract

This study aims to investigate the phenomenon of rhotacism in the speech of informants domiciled in the region of São José do Rio Preto, northwest of São Paulo state, Brazil. Rhotacism refers to the substitution of the lateral liquid sound with the rhotic sound, e.g. p[ɾ]anta (‘plant’) and sa[ɻ] (‘salt’) (Silva, 2011). The research is based on the Linguistic Variation and Change Theory (Labov, 2008) and also considers descriptions of this process in other varieties of Brazilian Portuguese, e.g. São José do Norte (RS) (Costa, 2007), Rio de Janeiro (RJ) (Tem Tem, 2010), and western Paraná (Cristino, 2021). To conduct the analysis, 16 samples of spontaneous speech were used from the Iboruna database (Gonçalves, 2024). The informants were stratified based on two genders (female and male), four age groups (16-25; 26-35; 36- 55; and above 55 years old), and two levels of education (first cycle of Elementary School and Higher Education), which are the social variables considered for this paper. The linguistic variables investigated include: (i) position of the segment in the syllable; (ii) preceding context of the segment; (iii) preceding segment voicing; and (iv) presence of another liquid segment in the word. The data analysis is conducted quantitatively using the statistical software Goldvarb X (Sankoff; Tagliamonte; Smith, 2005). Preliminary results indicate a rhotacism application rate of 10.2% out of the 1,915 analyzed occurrences. The position of the segment in the syllable is highlighted as a factor that favors the occurrence of rhotacism, particularly in cases of complex onset and medial coda, e.g. sim.p[ɾ]es (‘simple’) and a[ɻ].guém (‘somebody’), respectively.