Rhotic deletion in coda in Santomean Portuguese (PST)

an sociolinguistics analysis

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to analyze rhotic deletion in coda in Santomean Portuguese (PST), a Portuguese variety spoken in Sao Tome and Principe. This process was analyzed based on Variationist Sociolinguistics. Quantitative analyses have been carried out by softwares RStudio and Rbrul. Thus, we consider social (sex, age and education level) and linguistic (grammatical class, syllable stress, position in morphological word and quality of preceding vowels) variables that might favor or not the phenomenon. By examining 1523 rhotic occurrences in coda, we verified r-deletion in 56,53% of the data. The most significant variable is Segmental Position with the highest rate of r-deletion in word-final syllables (P. R. 71). Then, the sample was divided into two samples separately analyzed: 712 occurrences in word-medial coda and 811 occurrences in word-final coda. In word-medial coda, 32,6% of rhotics are deleted . The highest rates of loss are associated to elementary school (P.R. .62) and women (P.R. .59). In word-final coda, 77.5% of rhotics are deleted, Speakers with elementary school (P.R. .75) and younger speakers (P.R. .76) are more likely to delete the rhotic in coda. Considering Grammatical Class, r-deletion is favored in verbs (P.R. .62). These outcomes are compared with previous studies (BOUCHARD, 2017; BRANDÃO, 2018; BRANDÃO; DE PAULA, 2018; BRANDÃO et al., 2017) and with studies on PB and PE.