Rhotic resyllabification and prosodic boundaries in the south of Brazil

Abstract

This paper focuses on the variable process of R-resyllabification, which occurs when the rhotic is in external final coda and is followed by a vowel of subsequent word (calo[r, ?, ?, h] infernal ~ calo[Ø] infernal ~ calo[??]fernal “infernal heat”), and the relation of the process to prosodic constituent boundaries in the South of Brazil. The corpus consists of speech samples from 12 graduate students , born in Curitiba (4), Florianópolis (4) and Porto Alegre (4),  who were grouped according to sex - male and female, and age - 18 to 30 and 50 to 65 (https://alib.ufba.br/). The theoretical and methodological frameworks of this study include Quantitative Sociolinguistics and the Theory of Prosodic Hierarchy.  A total of 1,136 words were analyzed: 159 non-verbs and 977 verbs. The multivariate analysis shows that the rothic resyllabification rule is favoured by: 1) the morphological class of the word – non-verbs; 2) the length of the word which carries the R - 1 syllable; 3) the type of vowel in the syllabic nucleus - [+back]; and 4) the type of prosodic boundary - prosodic word.