A redução vocálica em palavras funcionais produzidas por falantes brasileiros de inglês como língua estrangeira

• Ano de defesa: 2010
• Autor(a) principal: Fragozo, Carina Silva
• Orientador(a): Brescancini, Cláudia Regina
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• 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 SEGUNDA LÍNGUA; INGLÊS - FONOLOGIA; INGLÊS - VOGAIS
• Link de acesso: http://hdl.handle.net/10923/4139

This research aims at analyzing the process of vowel reduction in function words by speakers of English as a Foreign Language (FL). This work has as a starting point the researches by Watkins (2001), who analyzed vowel reduction by speakers of English as a FL, and Marusso (2003), who investigated vowel reduction by native speakers of Portuguese and English. Based on these researches, this work considers both linguistic and extralinguistic factors that might influence the process of vowel reduction in function words, in the light of the interface between Sociolinguistics and Foreign Language Acquisition. In addition, this study intends to promote a reflection on the comparison between information obtained by perceptual verification and those obtained by acoustic verification. The sample is composed by sixteen female speakers of English as a FL, which were divided into four groups: intermediate speakers, advanced speakers, teachers of English courses and professors of the undergraduate course of Letras (English and Portuguese/English). Data collection was accomplished through an instrument composed by sixty affirmative sentences containing the function words at, for, from, of and to. The data were analyzed both perceptually and acoustically, and then were statistically examined by the software Goldvarb-X. The statistical analysis showed that the phonological vowel of the function word influences the process of vowel reduction, which was favored by the vowel /u/, related to the preposition to, in both analyses (acoustic and perceptual). In addition, vowel reduction was favored when the function words were followed by syllables with primary stress and words in strong position in the sentence, which shows the importance of the prosodic context for the phenomenon in analysis. Finally, the classification of the vowels as reduced in the perceptual analysis was favored by vowel deletion, followed by the production of schwa and of the vowels [U] and [E]. In both analyses, vowel reduction was favored by subjects with experience in Englishspeaking country whose learning started before the age of 13. Besides, reduction was favored by young professors and young advanced speakers in the acoustic analysis. In the analysis that considered each subject, we also found that speech rate, measured by the duration of each sentence, and speech register were relevant linguistic factors for the production of reduced vowels.