Acoustic and sociolinguistic analysis of pre-stressed mid vowels spoken in Montanha – ES

Abstract This article presents acoustic and sociolinguistic descriptions of pre-stressed mid vowels in Montanha, a city at the extreme north of Espírito Santo state. We selected four informants, two men and two women, in two age groups (18-30 and 31-50 years). The corpus was obtained from the presentation of figures inserted into the carrier sentence “Digo ______ baixinho” and repeated five times by speaker. Using the plug-in Akustyk within Praat, we extracted the values of the first and second formants of the vowels. As a result, we noticed that the medium-high vowels of Montanha are lower compared to those of Rio de Janeiro, Salvador and Vitória. About anteriority/posteriority, Montanha presented anterior vowels much more anteriorized, and posterior vowels much more posteriorized, compared to the other cities. Regarding sociolinguistic analysis, the age variable was selected by GoldVarb X program as the most significant for maintaining the medium-high vowel in pre-stressed position, and the range of 18 to 30 was the most responsible for this maintenance.

摘要：本研究对圣埃斯皮里图州极北地区城市蒙塔纳（Montanha）的预重音中元音（pre-stressed mid vowels）开展声学与社会语言学描写。本研究选取4名受访对象，分两个年龄组（18~30岁、31~50岁），男女各2名。语料通过向受访者展示嵌入框架句「Digo ______ baixinho」的图像获取，每名受访者重复朗读该句子5次。本研究借助Praat软件中的Akustyk插件，提取元音的第一、第二共振峰数值。研究结果显示，与里约热内卢、萨尔瓦多及维多利亚相比，蒙塔纳市的中高元音舌位更低。在前后性维度上，相较于其他三座城市，蒙塔纳市的前元音舌位更靠前，后元音舌位更靠后。社会语言学分析部分，GoldVarb X程序筛选出年龄变量为影响预重音位置中高元音留存的最显著因素，其中18~30岁年龄组对该元音特征的留存贡献最大。