<i>Status</i> da consoante pós-vocálica no português brasileiro: coda ou <i>onset</i> com núcleo não preenchido foneticamente?

Abstract

In Brazilian Portuguese (BP), the only consonants that can be licensed as codas are the liquids /l, r/, the nasal /N/, the fricative /s/ and, for some, the glides. Because the coda occupies the weakest position in the syllable structure (SELKIRK, 1982), it is common for this constituent to undergo a high degree of sociolinguistic variation, both word-internally and word-finally (e.g., QUEDNAU, 1993; TASCA, 1999; HORA, 2003, 2006; VOTRE, 1978; CALLOU, LEITE, MORAES, 1994; BRESCANCINI, 1996; RIBEIRO, 2006). Our goal in this study is to compare the behavior of the coronal liquids and fricatives in coda position, as spoken in the paraibano dialect (Hora , 2003; Ribeiro , 2006). The results observed confirm the existence of a differential behavior between post-vocalic consonants in word-internal and word-final positions. Our analysis is grounded on the proposals by Harris and Gussmann (1998) and Ewen and Hulst (2001). An investigation of the behavior of word-final consonants in the paraibano dialect leads us to two possible analyses: one in which codas are subject to deletion to obey a CV syllable preference, and one in which word-final consonants are treated as onsets of phonetically unfilled nuclei.