Processes and lexical representation: the case of the paulista dialect back vowels

ABSTRACT

According to the Contrastive Hierarchy Theory (DRESHER, 2003; 2009), the lexical representation of segments should be hierarchically arranged based on phonological contrasts and processes that affect a language’s phonemes. Based on this theory, (Lee, 2008) proposes that the vowels of Brazilian Portuguese be represented using the following hierarchy of features: [low] > [back] > [high] > [ATR]. However, this hierarchy does not account for the vowel elision process as it occurs in the paulista dialect: in this dialect, the final post-tonic /a/ and [u] vowels are affected by elision (cf. NOGUEIRA, 2007 and SANTOS, 2007). Hence, the present article puts forth a lexical representation for these vowels in which they are grouped under the same phonological contrast, explaining the fact that they are target of the same phonological process in the paulista dialect.

Key-words: lexical representation; back vowels; phonological processes; contrastive hierarchy of features