Gemination, degemination, and hiatus in Principense Portuguese

This paper discusses external vowel sandhi for identical vowels in Principense Portuguese (PP). Based on a corpus recorded in loco composed of 426 occurrences, we verified two processes of external vowel sandhi in this context: degemination and gemination, which co-occur with hiatus and pauses. Degemination and gemination are durationally distinct and favored by different prosodic prominence: degemination is the most common output in unstressed phrasal contexts, and gemination is preferred if V1 or V2 carries the phonological phrase accent. We conclude, therefore, that there are two moras related to the nucleus of the resyllabified syllable. We showed that positional prominence favors strengthening processes in PP, such as gemination, or even maintaining tonic syllabic nuclei by preserving the hiatus. Otherwise, weak positions, such as unstressed vowels at a word boundary, favor the phenomenon of shortening, that is, degemination. This result characterizes PP in relation to varieties such as Brazilian Portuguese (BP) and European Portuguese (EP), producing a unique outcome among documented Portuguese varieties.