A bibliography on nasal vowels in Portuguese

Abstract

We present a comprehensive bibliography on nasal vowels in Portuguese. Articles, books and book chapters, theses and dissertations were included, as well as abstracts featured in Brazil and in Portugal. Abstracts presented in local or regional meetings were excluded. There are 103 references on the subject, published between 1903 and 2012. To the best of our knowledge, they were never presented in a single publication. Taken together, we can see that the two trends approaching the question are kept much apart, phonetics and phonology. In phonological works, the debate on the mono- or biphonemic nature of nasal vowels, which occupied the structuralist authors, is replaced by a reinterpretation of the proposed system with no nasal vowels in several subsequent theoretical accounts. The phonetic approach is characterized by the use, in addition to acoustic analysis, of increasingly sophisticated techniques for describing the phenomenon: magnetic resonance imaging, speech synthesis, nasometry, and optical fiberscope.