Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

European varieties of Portuguese exhibit a process whereby unstressed vowels, particularly schwa, optionally undergo elision: an item such as idade ‘idea’ can be realized as [ida'd] and para Maria ‘for Maria’ may surface as [prɐmɐrí'ɐ]. While previous research in the study of phonological variation of this sort has typically focused on syntactic, morphological, functional, and segmental factors as the primary linguistic conditions for accurately characterizing variable processes (Guy 1980; Poplack & Walter 1986, among many others), less work has been done investigating the role of prosodic factors in this respect. Yet if one believes (along with Nespor and Vogel 1986, …