O /R/ em coda na cidade de Goiás : uma análise sociolinguística

Abstract

This research investigates the variation of /R/ in syllable coda in the speech of residents of Cidade de Goiás – GO. The study was conducted based on the theoretical and methodological assumptions of Variational Sociolinguistics (Labov, 2001; 2008[1972]; Weinreich; Labov; Herzog, 2006), which conceive language as an inherent part of social structure. Furthermore, a dialogue was established with studies on the social meaning of variation (Eckert, 2008, 2012) in order to understand how /R/ variation may be linked to the construction of social and historical identity, reflecting a deep sociocultural rootedness in the speech community under investigation. The phenomenon in question has already been widely analyzed in different linguistic communities, in studies that also support this dissertation, such as those by Amadeu Amaral (1920), Monaretto (1997, 2000, 2002), Callou, Leite, and Moraes (1996), Cristófaro Silva (2003), Rennicke (2016), and Ricardo (2022). Thus, by focusing on the aforementioned speech community, the study sought to fill a gap in sociolinguistic research, while also aiming to include Cidade de Goiás in the Brazilian sociolinguistic mapping. The corpus consisted of the database collected by Bernardes (2020), composed of 24 recorded interviews with residents of Vila Boa. The interviews were conducted using a semi-structured script. Excerpts containing occurrences of the linguistic phenomenon under analysis were then extracted. These occurrences were first subjected to acoustic processing using the PRAAT program in order to identify and distinguish the different sounds produced for /R/. Subsequently, the data were statistically analyzed using RStudio to verify the influence of linguistic and extralinguistic variables on the observed variation. The statistical analysis considered linguistic variables such as preceding phonetic context, following phonetic context, morphological class, coda position, syllable stress, word length, and morphological context. The social variables analyzed were gender, age group, and educational level. Logistic regression was applied with a focus on the retroflex variant due to its predominance in the analyzed corpus. The results indicated that, among linguistic variables, morphological class, coda position, and syllable stress were the most significant. Socially, age group stood out as the variable most strongly correlated with the occurrence of the variant. The prominent presence of the retroflex /R/ indicates that Cidade de Goiás is marked by a strong historical tradition, possibly inherited from the period of the Paulista Bandeirantes’ incursions during the Ciclo do Ouro in the 18th century.