UNCONVENTIONAL SPELLINGS OF PRETONIC VOWELS BY 6TH GRADE STUDENTS OF ELEMENTARY EDUCATION IN PONTA GROSSA (PR)

Abstract

This work aims to analyse unconventional spellings by students of the 6th year of Elementary School of two state public schools of Ponta Grossa, Paraná. Specifically, we investigate graphic exchanges in pretonic context between the vowels <e> and <i>, e.g. “filiz” (for “feliz”- ‘happy’) and “entestino” (for “intestino” - ‘intestine’); as well as between the graphemes <o> and <u>, e.g. “muleque” (for “moleque” - ‘boy’) and “molheres” (for “mulheres”- ‘women’). Therefore, these unconventional spellings are related to the variable phonetic-phonological phenomenon called vowel raising, in which the mid-high vowels /e/ and /o/ are pronounced, respectively, as the high [i] and [u], as in “p[i]dido” (‘request’) and “g[u]rdura” (‘fat’). As a theoretical background, this work follows the Heterogeneous way of writing organization (CORRÊA, 2004) and the classifications of unconventional spellings presented by Cagliari (1998) and Simões (2006). The corpus of this research consists of 203 textual productions from the Mendes database (2013). As general results, 49 occurrences of unconventional spellings of pretonic vowels were found, 49% of which were classified as cases of phonetic transcription/writing, while 51%, as occurrences of systemic overcorrection/regularization (CAGLIARI, 1998; SIMÕES, 2006). In these cases, there are indications, respectively, of the first and second axes of circulation of the writer through social practices of oral/spoken and literate/written: (i) the mode of constitution of writing in its genesis; and (ii) the appropriation of writing in its status as an institutionalized code (CORRÊA, 2004).