Sociophonetic study of Portuguese spoken in the Amazon: an interdialetal comparision between Belém and Macapá

Abstract

This paper presents an interdialectal comparison between Belém (PA) (BRITO, 2014) and Macapá (AP) Lemos (in progress) varieties, aiming at investigating the geoprosodic variation in the Portuguese spoken in Eastern Amazonia. Oxytone words in neutral declarative and total interrogative sentences were analyzed in order to observe the intonational variation of the fundamental frequency (F0) in the nuclear position of the utterances. The analysis is based on Sociophonetics (THOMAS, 2011), since it addresses an acoustic analysis of speech within the social context of the informants. This research is from the AMPER-Amazonia project, associated with the AMPER-POR project. The analyzed corpus totalized 432 observations (3 sentences x 2 modalities x 2 varieties x 3 repetitions x 12 informants). Data analysis covered six steps: coding of the repetitions; isolation; automatic segmentation in PRAAT; acoustic measurements; selection of the three best repetitions and application of the MatLab interface. The results from this relevant study revealed prosodic aspects in the speech from Belém and Macapá when indicated similar prosodic contours of F0 in the final stressed syllable in both modalities. However, prosodic features were more regular in yes-no question.