Nasal Coda and Vowel Nasality in Brazilian Portuguese

Despite different theoretical perspectives and methodologies, nasal vowels in Brazilian Portuguese are characterized by their variability. Such variability can be understood in terms of vowel height related to velum movement (Clumeck, 1976; Cagliari, 1977) or in terms of segmental right context (Almeida, 1976; Cagliari, 1977; Shosted, 2006; Lovatto, 2008; Medeiros et al., 2008). Brazilian Portuguese has five nasal vowels /ɜ ̃, e ̃, ĩ, õ, ũ/ that occur in syllables such as VCVo, CVCoVo , CV, where C can be either a plosive or a fricative consonant. There are longer words containing nasal vowels in Brazilian Portuguese, like encantando (enchanting), but for methodological reasons they will not be investigated in this study. In Southeastern Brazilian Portuguese dialect, /e ̃/ and /õ/ diphthongize (e ̃ȷ ̃ and õᴡ ̃, respectively) and for this reason have not been selected as targets for this or previous studies. The main goal of this study is to provide a better explanation of the nasal coda in Brazilian Portuguese, by means of comparing nasal to nasalized vowels in terms of acoustic features. Our claim is that the nasal vowel gesture in Brazilian Portuguese must be understood as two gestures not aligned in time. In other words, the nasal gesture starts after the vocalic gesture and goes beyond the closure gesture, in words like campa ([ˈkɜ ̃pɐ], gravestone), allowing for nasal quality relatively late in the vowel. The nasal coda is this nasal gesture that goes beyond the obstruent closure. Thus, the present paper is organized as follows: an introductory view is presented in sections 1 and 2; and a main study and an auxiliary study are presented in sections 3 and 4. The main study is a comparison between nasal and nasalized vowels, seeking a better understanding of different nasalization based on aerodynamical data, as well as on acoustic duration. The purpose of the auxiliary study is to compare oral and nasal codas to open syllables in similar contexts (e.g. capa, campa, caspa). In section 5 our proposal is discussed and in section 6 we offer a conclusion.