Um estudo sobre a variação da coda (s) com falantes da baixada Fluminense-RJ

Abstract

This study investigates the variable use of coda (s), drawing on production data collected from a new speech sample composed of speakers from the Baixada Fluminense region in the state of Rio de Janeiro, referred to as the Baixada-RJ Sample. Whereas previous studies on this variable have been based primarily on speech samples consisting of residents of the city of Rio de Janeiro, the aim of the present study is to examine which factors condition the different realizations of the coda fricative, with particular attention to the posterior variant, which has frequently been associated with speakers from peripheral areas and with lower levels of formal education. Accordingly, this study adopts the theoretical assumptions of the Theory of Variation and Change (Weinreich, Labov & Herzog, 1968; Labov, 1972), grounded in the principle that the linguistic system exhibits orderly heterogeneity, as well as those of Exemplar Models (Bybee, 2003, 2010; Pierrehumbert, 2003; Cristófaro-Silva & Gomes, 2020), which posit that the phonetic form of words stored in the lexicon encodes information indexing social characteristics. Data from twenty speakers in the new sample were analyzed using mixed-effects logistic regression models implemented in the R software environment (R Core Team, 2025). The results indicate that the posterior realization of coda (s) is strongly conditioned by structural factors (following phonetic context and stress), social factors (sex/gender and level of education), and lexical factors within the group of speakers examined in this study. Moreover, when these findings are compared with those from other speech samples mapping speakers from the city of Rio de Janeiro, it is observed that, despite originating from a peripheral region, the group analyzed appears to mirror the linguistic norms of middle-class speakers from the city, suggesting the possible integration of the Baixada Fluminense into a continuum of urban linguistic norms.