Concordância verbal com coletivos: restrições morfossintáticas e semântico-discursivas

Abstract

In this article, we deal with verbal agreement with collective nouns in the portuguese spoken in Fortaleza-Ceará, by assumptions of the Sociolinguistic Variation and Change. Our data come from two corpora: Português oral Culto de Fortaleza (Porcufort) and Norma Popular de Fortaleza (Norpofor), which are analyzed separately and then triangulated, with the purpose of verifying usage trends in the speech community. Although we controlled linguistic and extralinguistic factors, it was linguistics that showed statistical relevance: number of the noun phrase embedded in the subject and type of verb for Porcufort and type of verb for Norpofor. From Porcufort, 234 data were analyzed in which the agreement with a singular verb is motivated by the absence of a nominal phrase embedded in the subject and by an action-process verb. It is also the action-process verb that conditions the use of a singular verb with a collective noun in Norpofor, a corpus in which 120 occurrences were found. In the triangulated analysis, phonic salience of the verb, number of the nominal phrase embedded in the subject and intervening material between subject and verb showed significance, with the use of a singular verb arising, in general, from a less prominent verbal form, absence of an embedded phrase and absence of intervening material (or, in some cases, presence of two intervening phrases). From the results, we can infer that the singular form is preferred, motivated by morphosyntactic and semantic-discursive constraints.