Melo Antunes

The research focuses on the description and analysis of rhotics in syllable-locking position in three municipalities in the state of Rio de Janeiro: Petrópolis, Itaperuna and Paraty. Mid-word and absolute final realizations were taken into account, and were restricted to four types of occurrence: the alveolar tepe, the voiceless or voiced velar fricative, the retroflex tepe and the voiceless or voiced glottal fricative. The study is relevant because it frames a phenomenon that belongs to the framework of processes that shape the current stage of linguistic variation and change in Brazilian Portuguese - more specifically, in the Rio de Janeiro variant. The parameters of Quantitative Sociolinguistics, whose central name is William Labov (1972, 2001, among others), are used for the statistical analysis of the data. The corpus aims to cover phonetic-phonological processes other than just rhotic ones.