Nineteenth-century manuscripts of the Castro-PR: the case of raising

Abstract

This study focuses on the alternations of mid vowels /e/ and /o/ in the pretonic context, respectively, present in the XIX century manuscripts belonging to Castro - Paraná. As this kind of oscillation, called raising, is not a recent process in the Portuguese language, we seek for evidences of Labov uniformitarianism when describing the cases found in XIX century formal documents in comparison to the data of orality, made available by Bisol (1981) Viegas (1987, 2001) Bortoni et. al (1992), Kailer (2008). For this, we use the precepts of Historical Linguistics, joined to the Varionist theory, since we associate the qualitative approach to quantitative one, based on the structural perspective to the historical-social. The results indicated the vowel harmonization process as the main context for the application of the rule, followed by initial nasal context according to the data of orality. The precedent labiodental consonant and the next bilabial following the pretonic were more productive for /e/ and the precedent alveolar for /o/. Not all words fit into the structural rules, then, the individual investigation directed us to the realization that both neogrammarian position as the diffusionist one have importance in the investigation of variation and language change.