Resumo:

The deletion of the medial postonic vowel, a process that culminates the regularization of proparoxytone words to the paroxitone pattern, is an old phenomenon in Portuguese. Gomes (2012), in a variationist analysis that contrasts the Brazilian Portuguese (PB) with the European Portuguese (PE), finds that in the EP erasure rule is more frequent than in the PB, a variety that can be considered conservative in terms of the configuration of the systems vowels, given the variation that still occurs in the context of the realization of the medium vowels in the unstressed pretonic context and the negative social valuation to which vowel deletion is subject.