“P[e]neu”, “ad[e]vogado” e “af[e]tosa”: o abaixamento das vogais suarabácticas nos dados do Projeto Atlas Linguístico do Brasil

Abstract

This research reflects on the vowel epenthesis in Brazilian Portuguese, especially on the phonetic-phonological phenomenon known as suarabácti, which consists in the insertion of a epenthetic vowel to undo inappropriate consonant clusters. We use as corpus the data that make up the database of the Linguistic Atlas Project of Brazil, collected in two federal states, Paraná and São Paulo, with 220 stratified informants equally according to the variables gender (male and female) and range age (range I: 18 to 30 years/ range II: 50 to 65 years), all with maximum education until the 9th grade of elementary school. Three issues of Phonetic-Phonological Questionnaire were selected, namely: issue 54 (AFTOSA), 72 (PNEU) and 101 (ADVOGADO) and they were treated from the theoretical and methodological aspects of Dialectology and of variationist Sociolinguistics through graphics, linguistic maps and analysis according to the results obtained from the GoldVarb Program (2001), considering the intersection and linguistic and extralinguistic variables in the occurrence of the variable rule, vowel lowering [i] > [e].