Exceto onde especificado diferentemente, a matéria publicada neste periódico é licenciada sob forma de uma licença Creative Commons -Atribuição 4. ABSTRACT:In the present study, based on the perspective of Sociolinguistics Variationist (Labov, 2008(Labov, [1972), we analyze two phenomena related to the first person plural: the alternation of first person plural nós/a gente (we) and the agreement with nós (we). We focus on linguistic variables verb tense and phonic salience, and also the age and a stylistic variable -interaction with the interviewer. The corpus used consists of 32 interviews (Labov, 2008), belonging to the Portuguese Sample Spoken in the Rural Area of Santa Leopoldina, Espírito Santo. For the quantification of data, we use the program GoldVarbX (Sankoff; Tagliamonte and Smith, 2005). We noted that the implementation of a gente (we) is favored by contexts that express "run away from agreement ausence". We noted also that (1) nós is favored by present and past tense when there is ambiguity between the forms: if there is non-agreement, the morpheme -mos express past tense and the absence of the morpheme -mos express the present; (2) verbs that are less salient favor a gente or non-agreement; (3) men that have 26 to 49 years old favor a gente; (4) nós is most frequent when the interaction occurs with the interweer borned in the community.

In vernacular Brazilian Portuguese, use of 1st plural desinence -mos with nós ‘we’ is variable, although it is categorical in European Portuguese and very frequent in highly educated speakers in Brazil. Its absence is stigmatized in the urban context as an indication that the speaker ‘does not know how to speak Portuguese’. This phenomenon exhibits vigorous constraints and is subject to intricate structural conditioning based on tense and paradigmatic relationships, our main point. The most robust social effect is level of education. We analyze three samples and show that underlying this stigmatized morphosyntactic phenomenon there are effects on the functional level (tense distinctions), the cognitive level (marking of more easily perceptible forms), and the structural level (maintenance of phonological pattern).