From Speech To Writing: The Monophthongisation Of Falling Diphthongs In The Writing Of 3rd To 5th Year Ensino Fundamental Students

Abstract

The use of falling diphthongs has been widely discussed in studies based on Variationist Sociolinguistics in a considerable part of Brazil. The results obtained have demonstrated that the reduction of these diphthongs in words such as “touro”, “eixo”, for instance, is almost categorical, and, in its majority, the social constraints such as gender, age, and years of schooling are no longer significant, i.e. they are not selected by the computational programme responsible for the statistical analysis of the data, GOLDVARB. The concern towards the written language has not been as general as to the oral language, thus the interest in working with the former variable. Our objective in this paper is to investigate the interference of speech in writing through the monophthongisation process of the diphthongs [ej] ~ [e] e [ow] ~ [o] in 3rd to 5th year Ensino Fundamental students in one public and one private school in the city of João Pessoa. The authors who served as theoretical support to the research were Mollica (2000), Bortoni-Ricardo (2004), Almeida e Zavam (2004), Hora (2006), Bisol (1999) e Paiva (1996). The data collected through the tests, which were elaborated in accord with the dependent and independent variables controlled in the study, were analysed statistically, as aforementioned, by means of the GOLDVARB programme. Amongst the main results we have found that: the male students monophthongised more than the female ones; the monophthogised occurrences are less frequent to the extent that the level of schooling is higher; the monophthogisation of the diphthong [ow] is more productive than that of [ej]; the students from the private school monothongise less than those from the public school; and the variants coronal consonants and palatal consonants, when preceding the diphthong [ow], were selected as strongly favourable ones for the deleting of the semivowel from the diphthongs.