PRETONIC VOWELS OF PRÍNCIPE KABUVERDIANU

Abstract

This work focuses on Príncipe Kabuverdianu and describes its pretonic vowels, comparing them with the tonic ones. As a corpus for this study, data collected in Príncipe in 2018 were used and the theoretical assumptions are Acoustic Phonetics and previous descriptions of the kabuverdianu of Santiago, the island where most of the migrants come from (Carreira, 1983). Pretonic vowels were divided into oral and nasal. Oral pretonic segments were [i, e, ɛ, ə, ɐ, a, ɔ, o, u], which, compared to stressed vowels, last less (with the difference being on average 30 milliseconds) and are more centralized. As for vowels with a nasal feature, the application of heterosyllabic nasality (with the consonants [m] and [n] in the following syllable) was not recorded, with the realizations [i, e, ə, ɐ, a, o, u]. Considering the tautosyllabic nasality, the realizations [ĩ, ẽ, ɛ̃, ə̃, ɐ̃, õ] were found. Of the 20 occurrences of nasalized pretonics, in 17, the murmur was present both in front of fricatives and stops consonants. The nasalized pretonic vowels had a longer duration than their oral counterparts, which, together with the presence of the nasal murmur, can be pointed out as indicative of the biphonemic nature of the nasal vowel (/VN/). In short, the data analyzed bring new information regarding the descriptions of Santiago (such as the presence of 3 central vowels), which reveals the importance of studying different varieties and contributes to a greater understanding of the linguistic reality of Príncipe.