Sociolinguistic Aspects of Brazilian Portuguese: R Deletion

One of the main reasons that the theme of R deletion was chosen is personal; the pronunciation of this variable has followed me since I was a child. I used to live in São Paulo, Belo Horizonte, and Florianópolis. All these cities have a different pronunciation of the variable R, and, after I began to study sociolinguistics during my master’s degree, I saw the possibility of investigating this situation. The lay out of this dissertation apart from chapter I is organized as follows: • Chapter II discusses the literature review, presenting the main works carried out, and also analyses the main points of the Neogrammarian and Lexical Diffusion models. • Chapter III shows the methodology used, with the type of data, collection methods, and the methods of data analysis. This chapter also gives relevant information about the city investigated, Belo Horizonte. • Chapter IV discusses the results and presents the analysis of the R deletion phenomenon. This chapter also discusses the internal and external factors presented throughout this work. • Chapter V concludes this work--contrasting and confirming results discussed in the literature review--and also presents reflections on this work and makes suggestions for future research.