Análise sociolinguística do r em posição de coda final: estudo de caso com uma falante bilíngue do sul do Brasil

Abstract

The present research aims to analyze, through a qualitative analysis, the production of the rhotic in the final coda position, both in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) and English, by a Brazilian bilingual speaker, where BP is her first language and English is her L2. The participant is a bilingual adult woman and a professor in the English Language course at UTFPR-CT, where she uses her second language with relevant frequency. The data collection was organized in two phases, a semi-structured interview, which was carried out remotely, in 2020, and recording sections of 144 vehicle sentences, 72 in Portuguese (27 target sentences and 45 distracting sentences) and 72 in English (30 target sentences and 42 distractors). After the last phase, the piece of data was analyzed through a qualitative analysis based on a visual inspection of the spectrograms and on the measurement of the frequency of occurrence of the identified rhotics. The results obtained for the BP pointed out to a higher occurrence of the rhotic tap, in comparison to what the literature in the area presents as the usual production for the region of origin and residence of the informant (BOTASSINI, 2013). Regarding the English production, the analysis revealed a considerable influence of the rhotic patterns produced by the informant in BP in her pronunciation of the r-colored vowel in English. All the research and analysis of the results was made from the perspective of sociolinguistics and, in particular, sociophonetics, which showed us how the identity can influence the speaker’s linguistic choices.