The pretonic vowel /e/ in the speech of residents of the city of Tonantins (Amazon): a variationist study

Abstract

From the perspective of Variationist Sociolinguistics (Weinreich, Labov and Herzog, 2006; Labov, 2008; Coelho et al., 2010; Mollica e Braga, 2015), the research aimed to investigate the variation of the pretonic vowel /e/ in the state of Amazonas, based on speech data from residents of Tonantins city, by that contributing to the understanding of Brazilian dialectal areas. For this objective, it was described which variants of the pretonic vowel /e/ present in the speech of residents of Tonantins city (Amazonas), as well as which linguistic (‘previous consonant’; ‘consonant in syllabic coda’; ‘orality/nasality of the stressed vowel’ and ‘stressed vowel opening’') and extralinguistic independent variables (‘sex/gender’; ‘age group’; ‘education level’; ‘mobility’; ‘localism’ and ‘occupation’) that influences the use of one or another variant of the pretonic vowel /e/ in the speech of residents of that city. For the development of this study, it was used part of the collected data by Martins (2013) in her doctoral thesis. The corpus analyzed consists of 12 informants and it is stratified according to age group (18–35 years, 36–55 years, and over 56 years), sex/gender (male and female), and education level (4–8 years of schooling and 9–11 years of schooling). In total, we analyzed 3.097 realizations of the pretonic vowel /e/ in the statistical analysis program GoldVarb X. As a general result, the most frequent realization was the vowel [e] (41%), followed by the [ɛ] (31%) and [i] (28%) variants. These results corroborated those found by other research carried out in the amazon region (Maia, 2009; Brito, 2011; Justiniano, 2012; Quara, 2012; Cardoso, 2018; Maia, 2018; Mendonça, 2021; Batista, 2023) and, on the other hand, they differed from the data found by Nascentes (1953), Cruz (2004), Dias (2012), Azevedo (2013) and Tavares (2019). In order to understand the phenomenon in focus with regard to the independent linguistic and extralinguistic variables that influence it, the variant [e] analysis in relation to the variant [ɛ] was considered in the statistical round. The statistical program selected as preferred of that variant, in order of selection: ‘opening of the stressed vowel’; ‘orality/nasality of the stressed vowel’; ‘consonant in syllabic coda’; ‘previous consonant’; ‘age group’ and ‘sex/gender’. Accordingly, it can be observed that, for this phenomenon, linguistic variables carry more weight than extralinguistic ones.