Description
This research aims to investigate the origin and frequency of phonological variant, found in some words in pre-consonant syllable presented in the language repertoire of adult speakers from the community Livramento, Santa Filomena-PE. For that were recorded in
audio, speech fifteen (15) adult informants of the community in situations of oral narrative and semi-structured interviews, stratified according to social restrictions: sex, age, education, level of exposure outside the community and geographical origin. The methodology used was the case study, analyzed on a quantitative approach (frequency)
and qualitative (origin, motivation) of the data collected, based on the reference of sociolinguistic studies variationist from the perspective of Labov (2008), Bortoni-Ricardo (2005, 2011), Bagno (2007, 2011) and Mollica (2004). They were computed two variants, with the palatal fricative [ʃ] the one with the highest percentage of incidents - 68%, and the glottal fricative [h] having less occurrence, with 31%. The survey results showed that the fricative palatal variant [ʃ], held in place of the glottal fricative [h] occurs from the phonological conditioning the provision of / t / posterior position of [ h ], the variation is due to restrictions social, since this variant is part of the talk Piauí and Livramento community borders Piaui. Other factors such as gender, age, exposure and geographical origin, according to the survey results, favor the occurrence of variation in the speech
community. The linguistic factors analyzed, the word class of verbs was predominant among the analyzed variants, we infer that this happened because the function of class actions indicate, appearing more frequently in spontaneous speech. The results obtained from the analysis of the collected data allowed the expansion of the discussion regarding the behavior of the linguistic phenomenon of speech investigated community.
