A corpus-based approach to map target vowel asymmetry in Brazilian Veneto metaphony

Metaphony targeting upper-mid vowels /e, o/ is a characteristic of Central Veneto, a dialect of Veneto spoken in northeastern Italy. In a closely related understudied dialect spoken in southern Brazil, namely Brazilian Veneto (locally known as Talian), metaphony is also observed. Although the phenomenon is reported as variable for both dialects, little is known about how such variation is structured. In this paper, we explore the structural conditioning of metaphony in Talian through a corpus study. We show that metaphony in this dialect is asymmetrical, as /e, o/ exhibit different rates of application, which are conditioned by number of syllables in the word and morphology. We formalize this asymmetry using a MaxEnt Grammar. Finally, we introduce the Talian Corpus, a corpus of written materials in Talian that promotes the linguistic study of this variety.