A africação na interlíngua português-inglês na região de colonização italiana do nordeste do Rio Grande do Sul

Abstract

The dependent variable of this study is the spurious affrication (or palatalization) of alveolar stops /t/ and /d/ in Brazilian Portuguese-English interlanguage of learners of the same speech community in Caxias do Sul, town which belongs to the Italian Colonization Region in Northeastern Rio Grande do Sul. In Brazilian Portuguese, alveolar stops are subject to allophonic processes and serve as a dialect marker. Considering L1 transfer, it is expected that the production of English final alveolar stops is problematic, as it is inferred by Bettoni Techio (2005). Through Interlanguage Analysis, we investigated the L2 phonology of sixteen beginning learners of English as a Foreign Language. There was rule application in 5.3% of contexts obtained. The independent variables of the study were: L1 transfer, other(s) L2 transfer, variability due to: a) linguistic environment, b) gender, c) ancestry and d) linguistic attitude. Out of the controlled variables, variability due to the linguistic environment (composed of following context, voicing and tone) was considered significant by statistical tests carried out for this study. In the community of speech and practice investigation, spurious affrication (or palatalization) of alveolar stops in Brazilian Portuguese-English interlanguage is conditioned favorably by the factors: a) target sound /t/ and /d/ followed by a vowel, b) voiceless target sound /t/ and c) target sound in stressed syllable.