The stressed mid vowels of the modern Portuguese through the rhymes of the 17th century: an interface between poetry and linguistics

Abstract

This research aims to investigate the pronunciation of the stressed mid vowels in Portuguese of the 17h century, through the observation of the rhymes of the poetry from that period. The corpora of this research comprise the poems of the book A Fênix Renascida and the sonnets written by the Luso-Brazilian poet Gregório de Matos, who is considered the most representative name of the Baroque in Brazil. The methodology adopted in this study will be based, essentially, in mapping and analyzing all the rhymes with stressed mid vowels in these literary texts. Knowing that the ancient writing, like the present, had only two graphemes to represent phonemes concerning to stressed mid vowels of Portuguese (/e, E, o, /), the possibilities and impossibilities of rhyme between mid vowels represented by identical graphemes will be evaluated, in this work. Data from this study will be compared to data from 13th, 15th and 16th centuries (in FONTE, 2010, 2014) and, from this comparison between successive synchronicities, it will be proposed a diachronic framework of Portuguese mid vowels (stressed) that comprises different periods along the history of the language: Galician-Portuguese, Middle and Modern Portuguese (cf. CASTRO, 2008, p 73). (AU)