Aspectos sonoros dos anglicismos no português brasileiro

Abstract

The aim of this research is to investigate the pronunciation of certain lexical borrowings in Brazilian Portuguese and the way in which eight Brazilian students of English as a foreign language from Belo Horizonte manage to re(learn) the very same words in English. A study has therefore been carried out selecting lexical borrowings based on their current use in Brazilian Portuguese, acceptance as dictionary entries, acceptance by the Vocabulário Ortográfico da Língua Portuguesa and token frequency. The words were then read aloud by participants from different schools, gender and proficiency level. The phonetic transcriptions of such words, after being acoustically verified, produced data that were subsequently statistically analysed, taking into consideration the research variables. Making use of the theory of Language Transfer (ODLIN, 1989), multirepresentational models Exemplars Model (JOHNSON; MULLENIX, 1997; PIERREHUMBERT, 2001, 2003) and Usage-Based Phonology (BYBEE, 2000, 2001) it has been found out that the pronunciation of such words occurs gradually and wordspecifically, differently from the process-like and predictable way it had first been expected to be. If on the one hand the data obtained have shown that gender was not a relevant factor for the pronunciation of such words, on the other hand it has suggested that proficiency level and the place where the participants study English do play an important role in the way the loanwords are managed. Besides that, the token frequency of the words as neologisms in Brazilian Portuguese does not seem to be influential in their pronunciation in English.