THE EFFECT OF STYLE ON THE PALATALIZATION OF DENTAL PLOSIVES

Abstract

Within the framework of the Variationist Sociolinguistics (LABOV, 1966, 1972, 2001), this research aims at analyzing the influence of style in the palatalization of dental plosives /t, d/ (for example, dest[ʃ]ino 'destiny' and desd[ʒ]e 'since'), in the Brazilian Portuguese dialect spoken in the speech community of João Pessoa - Paraíba. Data from 5 individuals from the corpus of the Project Linguistic Variation in the State of Paraíba – VALPB (HORA, 1993) were collected by means of these three instruments: sociolinguistic interview, reading passage and phonetic inquiry. Results show that the use of palatalization increases according to the degree of formality of the data collection instrument (χ² (2, n = 1053) = 18.68, p < 0.001): phonetic inquiry (16.9%, n = 89), reading passage (7%, n = 143) and sociolinguistic interview (5.1%, n = 821).