THE DELETION OF MEDIAL POSTONIC VOWEL IN THE URBAN VARIETY OF SÃO TOMÉ

A SOCIOLINGUISTIC ANALYSIS ON THE REDUCTION OF PROPAROXYTONS

Abstract

The deletion of the medial postonic vowel, a process that culminates the regularization of proparoxitone words to the paroxitone stress pattern, is an old phenomenon in Portuguese, with roots in Latin. The reduction of proparoxitones is observed in several varieties of Brazilian Portuguese (BP) and European Portuguese (EP). However, few studies have devoted themselves to describing the phenomenon in other varieties of Portuguese. This article proposes a description of the process of deletion of the medial postonics vowel in São Tomé Portuguese, in data related to the urban variety of the archipelago's capital, located on the Atlantic coast of the African continent. The hypothesis that guides this work is that the proparoxitones, a non-natural stress pattern even in contexts in which Portuguese is the majority language, would be consistently regularized to paroxitone pattern in the Sao Tome variety, because of the coexistence of Portuguese with local languages in the community.