A aquisição das seqüências finais de obstruintes do inglês (L2) por falantes do sul do Brasil: análise via teoria da otimidade

• Ano de defesa: 2008
• Autor(a) principal: Alves, Ubiratä Kickhöfel
• Orientador(a): Bisol, Leda
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: por
• Instituição de defesa: Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul; Porto Alegre
• Palavras-chave em Português: LINGUÍSTICA; AQUISIÇÃO DA LINGUAGEM; FONOLOGIA
• Link de acesso: http://hdl.handle.net/10923/4091

This study aims to investigate the acquisition of final monomorphemic obstruent clusters in English by Southern Brazilian Portuguese speakers. Based on our empirical investigation, we propose an Optimality-theoretical analysis (Prince & Smolensky 1993, 2004) to account for the varied syllable patterns found in the learners’ attempts to produce the target complex codas. Our empirical study was based on data from 32 subjects, who were organized in four different proficiency levels. In our discussion of the data, we aim to point out which of these forms differ from the L2 target, focusing on those ones which imply a change in syllable structure. Our data show that epenthesis is the most commonly employed syllable repair strategy, as the additional vowel adapts the L2 complex system to a pattern which is closer to the one in the first language. The analysis of the learners’ developmental stages, which departs from the L1 hierarchy toward a grammar which leads to the production of the target forms, is based on the Gradual Learning Algorithm (Boersma & Hayes, 2001).Special attention is also given to the formalization of markedness constraints. In order to derive constraints from harmonic scales, we rely on two constraint schemas: Harmonic Alignment (which accounts for the sonority differences in coda) and Local Constraint conjunction (which accounts for the differences in place of articulation). We argue that the mechanism of Local Conjunction is also available in L2 development, despite being restricted to conditions which limit its use. We believe that our analysis may prove relevant not only to the field of language acquisition, but also to the study of formal models of grammar, such as Optimality Theory.