VARIATIONISTIC STUDY OF THE REDUCTION OF PREPOSITION PARA IN MACEIÓ/AL

Abstract

This paper aims to analyze how the variation of the preposition para to its variants [para], [pra] and [pa], in speech from Maceio, is processed due to the influence of social and linguistic factors. In this research, the corpus was collected with thirty informants. We tested the following independent variables: next phonological context, parallelism, accent of the next syllable, class of the next word, presence of tepe in the following item, age-grading and sex. The collected recordings have been transcribed in the ELAN and multivariate analysis of the data has been performed by Goldvarb program which did not consider the interference of the variables parallelism and morphological class of the following word as statistically significant in the studied variation. From the collected corpus, we verified an low amount (less than 1%) of occurrences of the variant [para] which it was removed from the analysis. So, the favorable contexts for innovative form [pa] were: i) coronal consonants and back vowels; ii) presence of tepe in next syllable; and iii) absence of accent on the next syllable. In addition, we found that younger and women speakers produce the variant [pra]. These results point to the disappearance of the variant [para] in maceioense’s speech.