The status of unstressed lax-mid vowels in northern dialect of Brazilian Portuguese

Abstract

This study experimentally analyses the claim that northern dialects of Brazilian Portuguese show a pattern of reduction via laxing. With an experiment of sentence reading that resulted in a corpus of 4800 tokens, the analysis showed that it is possible to predict the surfacing of tense-mid vowels. In the data, they either result from [+ATR] harmony or coarticulation. Lax-mid vowels, however, cannot be fully predicted as the result of harmony. It is also shown that the quality of unstressed lax-mid vowels is not different from their stressed counterpart, a further evidence that reduction via laxing in fact, exists. --- Original in English.

Keywords

• Neutralization. Lax-mid vowels. ATR. Brazilian Portuguese. Northern dialects.