As consoantes geminadas do italiano : análise de sua produção por falantes italianos e por aprendizes brasileiros

Luciana Pilatti Telles

In this dissertation, we investigate the geminate consonants of Italian using production data collected from Italian speakers and Brazilian learners who take undergraduate courses at the Italian Section of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS). The general question that guided our acoustic and phonological analysis is whether Brazilian speakers who are learners of Italian acquire such consonants. Geminates are characterized phonetically as long consonants (Ridouane, 2010) and, phonologically, they are mora-bearing (McCarthy &Prince, 1986; Hayes, 1989; Morén, 1999). In Italian, these segments are distinctive (Dardano &Trifone, 1999) in word-internal position, but not when they emerge at the phrase level, between words. In this environment, consonant germination is created by grammar, enforcing prosodic well-formedness conditions. Based on these facts, we have analyzed production data for geminates. Specifically, the data were collected and analyzed with PRAAT (version 5.1.42) software (Boersma &Weenink, 2010). The analysis of consonant length in the Italian and Brazilian data showed that: (1) prosodic context interferes with the length of segments; (2) even though prosodic context interferes with length, contrast is preserved in the data from Italian participants; (3) initially, learners tend to associate consonant length with the placement of primary stress; however, as they advance through the course, learners start to produce, in addition to geminate consonants in stressed environments, geminates in unstressed environments, though not categorically. We have developed our analysis based on the principles of Optimality Theory (Prince &Smolensky, 1993/2004). Following the predictions of Moraic Theory (Hayes, 1989) and the proposal of Morén (1999), we show, based on the relevant literature and our own results, that the acquisition of geminates by Brazilian learners depends on a high ranking of the MAXLINK-MORA[CON] faithfulness constraint, which is active in the grammar of Italian participants. Geminates that cause branching in stressed syllables can be found even in the data from Brazilian learners enrolled in beginner-level Italian courses. In this case, what ensures their production is the high ranking of WSP, which associates syllable weight with stress, and interacts with markedness constraints FTBIN, related to foot binarity, *LONGV, which assigns a violation to candidates with long vowels, as well as EDGEMOST-R, which militates in favor of alignment of the stress with the right margin of the word. The consonant quantity enforced by the grammar in favor of the creation of harmonic feet (as in the case of phrase gemination) corresponds to the scenario of coerced moraicity (Morén, 1999). Our analysis shows that, in the data of learners, the moras of geminate consonants at the end of stressed syllables are preserved due to the high ranking of markedness constraints that militate in favor of well-formed feet and to the limitation of primary stress to the three-syllable window. Concerning phrase gemination, in spite of the relationship between stress and gemination, such a phenomenon was optional in the data from one of the Italian speakers. We assume that the position of NOCODA/¿ (adapted from Flack, 2009), without a strict ranking with respect to WSP, justifies its optionality, which also appears in the data of Brazilian learners. Our results lead us to believe that the optionality of outputs with Raddoppiamento Sintattico (Nespor &Vogel, 1986) and the non-categorical acquisition of lexical geminates indicate that the learning algorithm is gradual (Boersma, 1997; Boersma &Hayes, 2001).

As consoantes geminadas do italiano : análise de sua produção por falantes italianos e por aprendizes brasileiros

AUTOR(ES)

FONTE

DATA DE PUBLICAÇÃO

RESUMO

ASSUNTO(S)

ACESSO AO ARTIGO

Documentos Relacionados