O uso variável do modo imperativo na fala de Fortaleza

Abstract

The present study analyzes the use of the imperative in the speech of Fortaleza, under the dome of Quantitative Sociolinguistics, using database NORPOFOR – Norma Oral do Português Popular de Fortaleza, as a source of collection to the sample. The goal is to analyze the use of grammatical imperative in the speech of cearense’s capital city, considering semantic and morphosyntactic motivation such as verbal conjugation, oblique pronouns position, polarity of sentence structure, semantic group and sentence verb as well as the ones of social nature like gender, education level and age range. Previous researches of Scherre (2007; 2005; 1999) and Cardoso (2009), which mention or directly work with data concerning Fortaleza, and Alves (2001), referring to João Pessoa, state of Paraíba, indicate that subjunctive imperative finds in these speech communities a relatively significant percentage of use. The data of this research were put through GOLDVARB X software (SANKOFF; TAGLIAMONTE; SMITH, 2005), distributed among nine social and linguistic factor groups. The linguistic factor groups significantly selected by GOLDVARB X were verbal conjugation, polarity of the sentence structure and the oblique pronoun position, referring to the use of the subjunctive imperative variable. In general terms, the results revealed that imperative associated to indicative, with a 60% occurrence, was the most frequent form in the speech sample of Fortaleza. The subjunctive form showed 40% of use, opposing to our expectations, once we hoped that the imperative associated to this form should present higher frequency of use in the speech of the cearense capital.