The process of palatalization in native Florianopolitans speech in spontaneous and controlled speech corpus

Abstract

In this work, we present a study on the process of palatalization of the coronal sibilant in coda based on data from a read corpus. The data were collected in the locality of Ribeirão da Ilha, Florianópolis. The method used to choose the informants was stratified random, involving a total of 24 people. Our corpus was assembled to cover diverse structural contexts, totaling 68 sentences. With a focus on Laovian sociolinguistics and Trait Geometry Phonology, we analyze the role of structural and social variables in the phenomenon. In addition, we compared the results about palatalization with an earlier study, done in the same locality with a spontaneous speech corpus (Brescancini, 1996), in order to verify to what extent the style question affects the phenomenon. Our results showed that the contexts in which there was retraction and elevation of the body of the tongue (dorsal consonants and labial and dorsal vowels) favored the use of the palate-alveolar variant. The results referring to social variables point to an indication of external influences in the sense of non-palatalization, considering that Florianópolis has been receiving many people from other cities and states. Comparison with the spontaneous speech study showed that the more formal style (read corpus) affects the application of the rule, especially among the more educated women.