A primeira pessoa do plural em Santa Leopoldina/ES: correlação entre alternância e concordância

Abstract

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.

When a New Pronoun Crosses the Border: The Spread of A Gente on the Brazilian-Uruguayan Frontier

“…These results provide strong evidence that, once the innovative a gente is used, it by itself triggers recurring uses, in line with previous research (cf . Omena 1996a;Zilles 2005;Mendonça 2010;Rubio 2012;Mattos 2013;Foeger 2014;Pacheco 2014;Vianna and Lopes 2015;Souza 2020; among others). Notably, speakers in both communities respond to this factor, similarly showing continuity across variable grammars.…”

“…The authors noted a strong interaction between the two variables of phonic salience and verb tense, given that the plural vs. singular opposition is less salient in imperfect forms (amava/amávamos) than in preterit forms (amou/amamos). More recent studies combine both variables into a single group (e.g., Mattos 2013Mattos , 2017Foeger 2014;Benfica 2016;Foeger et al 2017;Naro et al 2017;Scherre et al 2018aScherre et al , 2018b. We follow the precedent of these previous studies in combining phonic salience and verbal tense into one variable.…”

“…(50-year-old Uruguayan man 3 ) Once all the verbs with first-person referents had been identified, both in their singular (referring to either expressed and unexpressed nós or a gente, depending on the previously expressed pronoun) and plural form (referring to nós), they were subjected to a multivariable analysis. The decision to include singular forms and further investigate whether the referent was nós or a gente (and code accordingly) was based on the fact that verbal agreement with nós subjects is variable in Brazilian Portuguese (Omena 1996a(Omena , 1996bNaro et al 1999;Vianna 2011;Vianna and Lopes 2015;Lopes 2003;Zilles 2005;Muniz 2008;Rubio 2012;Mattos 2013Mattos , 2017Foeger 2014;Benfica 2016;Foeger et al 2017;Naro et al 2017;Scherre et al 2018aScherre et al , 2018bamong others). While a gente subjects may also take plural verbal morphemes in some areas of Brazil, this occurred only once in both varieties of Aceguá Portuguese (Pacheco 2014), coinciding with Zilles's results for Porto Alegre, the largest city in the area (Zilles 2005, p. 36).…”

“…In Brazilian Portuguese, verbal tense impacts the nós/a gente variable in several ways (Foeger 2014). For example, a gente is more common with imperfect verb forms, in order to avoid placing stress on the antepenultimate syllable (amava/amávamos).…”

“…Finally, especially among urban speakers, the use of a gente has the potential to decrease the realization of verbal forms that lack standard plural agreement with present and imperfect forms, where the referent is nós (e.g., a gente fala instead of nós fala; a gente falava instead of nós falava). Thus, we follow previous studies (Zilles 2005;Foeger 2014;Scherre et al 2018b) and include six factors within the verbal tense and phonic salience group, illustrated in Examples ( 9)-( 15) from the least to the most salient forms:…”