Non-lexical Filled Pauses in eh... Brazilian Portuguese dialectal contact

Although filled pauses (FPs) have been argued to be an unconscious and highly idiosyncratic feature (Boer; Heeren 2019), recent sociolinguistic works show that FPs can be operationalized as a sociolinguistic variable (Fruehwald 2016), exhibit regular social stratification (e.g., Wieling et al 2016), are acoustically different across languages and can be acquired in language contact settings (e.g., Erker; Bruso 2017). This paper investigates the realization of non-lexical FPs in a dialect contact situation in Brazilian Portuguese, as the mid-open fronted vowel [ɛ] vs. the more central vowel [a, ɐ, ɐ̃], analyzed as categorical (eh vs ah) and gradient variables–vowel height (F1), vowel frontness (F2), and vowel duration (ms). The main objectives are to determine whether there are dialectal differences in Brazilian Portuguese regarding FPs; and if so, whether Northeastern migrants living in São Paulo accommodate to the Paulista variant and which social factors predict acquisition. Assuming FPs are below the level of consciousness, this paper also discusses the role of salience in dialect contact (Trudgill 1986, Nycz 2018, Erker 2022). FPs were thus analyzed in a corpus of 40 Northeastern migrants living in São Paulo, balanced for gender, age of arrival, and length of residence, in contrast with 24 non-mobile natives (12 Northeasterners-NE and 12 Paulistas-SP). Analyses of 1,137 tokens of FPs show that eh is the preferred variant in all samples, but with significant differences for the rates of ah (NE: 2.3%; migrants: 7.8%; SP: 18.2%; χ2 = 37.6(2), p