Portuguese Has Two Underlying Rhotics: Evidence from Lisbon and Carioca Varieties

Abstract

    Like many Romance languages, Portuguese has a weak-r (tap) and a strong-R (posterior fricative). At the surface level, these two rhotics are only contrastive between vowels, whereas they are neutralized in other positions. How the Portuguese rhotics are represented at the underlying level is still a matter of debate. Competing analyses differ with respect to whether the Portuguese word-initial strong-R is derived by a position-sensitive rule (one-rhotic analysis) or stems from its underlying form faithfully (two-rhotic account).     In the current study, we designed a transformational language game to probe the underlying nature of this initial rhotic. The participants were asked to name objects represented in pictures and to add a stressed prefix [ˈpa] whenever an object was presented in black-and-white. 8 native speakers from Lisbon and 8 from Rio de Janeiro participated in the game. In general ,participants consistently produced a posterior fricative after prefixation. These data show that the Portuguese word-initial strong-R is not a result of rule application, suggesting that Portuguese has two underlying rhotics.