Monotongação e ditongação: um estudo dos reflexos da variação sonora em textos do século XVII ao XX

Abstract

This work seeks to carry out a comparative-descriptive study of the graphophonetic phenomena of monophthongization with the reduction of oral and nasal diphthongs, and diphthongization, with the insertion of the semivowel [j] and semivowel [w], in order to identify the contexts in which occur in texts written by writers who are not very skilled in writing techniques. The corpora that will be used as a basis for the study are letters from sertanejos baianos (20th century), writers stationed in the initial phase of acquiring writing, who were characterized by Santiago (2019) as inábeis writers, in addition to data extracted from 12 interviews -oral narratives from these same sertanejos. The analysis has objective oh the to verify how the graphophonetic phenomena behave in texts written by writers unfamiliar with writing in different periods, documents from the Portuguese inquisition of the 17th century (MARQUILHAS, 2000), commercial letters written by inábeis Portuguese merchants from the 18th century (BARBOSA, 1999), and the minutes written by Africans and people of African descent in Bahia in the 19th century (OLIVEIRA, 2006). The theoretical-methodological framework is based on studies of Historical Sociolinguistics from Conde Silvestre (2007), Romaine (2009 [1982]), and Mattos e Silva (2004), also from Variationist Sociolinguistics based on studies by Labov (2008 [1972]) and Weinreich, Labov and Herzog (2006 [1968]). The comparison between the corpora showed that monophthongization appears in all collections mainly in 3 diphthongs, namely: ou, ei and ai. Diphthongization occurs, in most cases, because of syllables stopped by /S/, in the case of the semivowel [j], and in relation to the semivowel [w] it forms decreasing diphthongs. More than 280 occurrences of the two phenomena were found in the narrative interviews, with a greater number of monophthongizations in favorable contexts similar to that of texts.