Processes of assimilation involving dental stop consoants /t, d/ in brasilian Portuguese

Abstract

The major aim of this paper is to present, based on quantitative sociolinguistics, a analyse of the process of progressive assimilation that involve the dental stop consonants. First of all, one overview about the regressive assimilation, which was extensively studied in Brazilian Portuguese, will be present. Then, the contexts of progressive assimilation in the speech community of Itabaiana-PB will be analyzed. The motivation for this paper is the fact that, in the dialect from Itabaiana, the process of progressive assimilation, in words such as muito ‘many/much’ and gosto ‘like”, in which the preceding phonological context exerts influence over the following one, tend to undergo the process of regressive assimilation, such as as pote ‘pot’ and bote ‘boat’, more useful when we think about the Brazilian Portuguese. The theoretical approach underlying the research is the variation theory, or quantitative Sociolinguistics, pioneered by William Labov (1972). The data collected had already been electronically stored in the corpus from Projeto Variação Linguística da Paraíba – VALPB. The sample consists of 36 informants from the community, being stratified according to gender, age group and years of schooling. As result, the computer program Goldvarb (SANKOFF; TAGLIAMONTE; SMITH, 2005) pointed as favorite to the application of the rule: the gender (male gender), the level of schooling (no scholar historic since the primary), the following phonological context (high back vowel), the precedent phonological context (monophthong), and the tonicity (post-stressed syllable).