Resyllabification of laterals in Brazilian Portuguese

Abstract

Lateral sounds in Brazilian Portuguese have received some amount of attention, both from quantitative studies and from dialectology. In this paper we will study the variable pronunciation of /l/ as either consonantal or vocalic, relating it to the possibility of resyllabification across different types of prosodic boundaries. We examine the patterns of vocalization/non-vocalization in a sample of speakers from Porto Alegre, the capital of the southern Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul, using quantitative analysis. Our results provide empirical support for the role of prosodic constituents in Brazilian Portuguese phonology.