A fricativa coronal /S/ do português do sul do Brasil: abordagem fonológica e fonético-acústica

Abstract

The present dissertation aims at describing acoustically the coronal fricative /s/ of Brazilian Portuguese spoken in the city of Pelotas. The focus is to determining the acoustic characteristics of this consonant in different syllabic positions in order to verify how acoustic properties may explain its behavior in the coda position. The studies regarding the Syllable Theory were one of the motives behind the research, and the Acoustic Theory of Speech Production served as the theoretical foundation of this study. The experiment of speech production controlled the fricative in different contexts, controlling following and previous vowel and consonantal context of voiceless and voiced occlusives. The stress pattern of the syllable in which /s/ was placed and gender of the participants were also considered for the analysis. Four volunteers, born and living in Pelotas, between the ages 30 and 50 years, with university degrees and monolingual, participated in this research. The data was collected in soundproof booth, and the acoustic analysis was performed using Praat (BOERSMA; WEENINK, 2001). The parameters considered for the analysis of the fricative included duration and four spectral moments: center of gravity, standard deviation or variance, skewness and kurtosis, which were analyzed separately for each context in which the fricative was inserted. The results suggest that the fricative /s/ behaves differently depending on syllable position and context in which it is. This, it can be argued that the segment seeks to adjust to the syllabic position of coda, even though the feature sonorant sets it apart from the other licensed consonants for the coda position in Brazilian Portuguese.