A alternância das formas pronominais tu, você e o (a) senhor (a) na função de sujeito no português falado em Cametá - PA

Abstract

This thesis presents a study of the alternation of pronominal forms of reference to the second person, Tu/Você/o(a) Senhor(a), in the subject function, in the Portuguese spoken in the urban area of Cametá, Northeast of the State of Pará. It adopts, as a theoretical framework, the interface between two postulates: Linguistic Variation and Change Theory and Linguistic Functionalism, generating a featured approach within the language studies of social functionalist. Our research intends to analyze the role of linguistic factors (pronoun reference, verbal structure, structural parallelism, type of report/speech, type of sentence, discursive tense and grammatical tense) and of extralinguistic or social factors (sex/gender, age, level of education and social relationship between the interlocutors) as motivators of the variable behavior of tu/você/o(a) senhor(a) in the subject function. The corpus contains data of face to face interaction of 16 focus groups, each one constituted by 04 (four) participant individuals, with one being the basis informant, all born in Cametá, stratified by age (21-29 years old and 32-42 years old), gender (male and female) and level of education (high school and higher education), totalizing 64 participants. By the basis informants speech, we got 527 data uses of Tu, Você e o(a) Senhor(a), which were quantitatively (via use of the statistical package GOLDVARB) and qualitatively analyzed, following the theoretical assumptions of the labovian sociolinguistic and of the North American functionalism. The results pointed 307 occurrences of the pronominal form tu, 182 of você and only 38 of o(a) senhor(a), which represents, respectively, 58.3%, 34.5%, e 7.2%. We noticed that the tu form is favored when in syntactic parallelism tu-tu, by the exclamatory sentence, by the indirect/direct reference to a individual, by men, high school speakers and on socially symmetric interactions; the form você is also motivated by the syntactic parallelism você-você principle, it occurs with higher frequency in indirect reference to an interlocutor or a group of generic denotation and in the own speech/direct speech; regarding the form o(a) senhor(a), we noticed that it is conditioned by the interrogative sentence, direct/specific reference to an individual, reported speech (of the own speaker and/or third person), preferred by younger individuals and by the women. Within the Social functionalism, evaluating the correlation between dependent variable and independent variables by the principle of marking, we noted that the form tu is less marked in the language of Cametá, considering the distribution of frequency and structural complexity. Therefore, it occurs in less marked environments, attesting the principle of marking (GIVÓN, 1995), as in: contexts of parallel structures tu-tu and specific direct and indirect type of reference to an interlocutor. The form você, that presents less frequency and greater structural and cognitive complexity, hence more marked, finds predilection, in more marked contexts, as: generic reference and negative declarative type of sentence. Similarly o(a) senhor(a), marked pronoun in the language, also occurs in more marked, of greater structural and cognitive complexity, contexts, as interrogative and negative sentences.