Evaluation of variable use of pretonic vowels: preliminary studies of beliefs and attitudes

Abstract

The present research combines the assumptions of Variationist Sociolinguistics and the methodology of analysis of linguistic beliefs and attitudes (LAMBERT, 1967; GOMEZ MOLINA, 1998), based on sociolinguistically stratified corpora of speakers from Rio de Janeiro to analyze the process of raising of pretonic mid vowels. Firstly, we focus on cases of semantic specialization. Through a phonetic-phonological questionnaire and a perception questionnaire, we observes how the users of the language produce the items whose meanings can influence in the choice of the pretonic variant. The hypothesis is that the rise tends to occur in the expression of less valued meanings (VIEGAS, 1987). In the second study, the attitude test is composed of three techniques to observe: (i) in reading text, if the informant performs the raising when reading certain words in the text; (ii) in the interview, the subjective evaluation of the speaker in relation to the phenomenon; and (iii) in the questionnaire, if the judge is affected by the perception test previously performed. The results of both studies show a relative negative evaluation of the use of the high variants, differently from the studies that focus exclusively on the conditioning factors.