Avaliação e atitudes sociolinguísticas no português europeu madeirense

Abstract

This research presents analysis on the linguistic evaluation of the Madeiran Portuguese, through corpora (sociolinguistic interviews selected from the Funchal sample of CORPORAPOT and Corpus Sociolinguístico do Funchal (CSF) and using questionnaires carried out within the research work of Andrade (2014), Rodrigues (2018) and Nunes (2019). Two sociolinguistic variables were selected for a more detailed examination: the anaphoric realization of OD (non-standard variants – he, him and zero realization – and the standard variant, with clitic o) and the existential constructions (non-standard variant – with having – and standard variant – with having). The main objective of this analysis is to contribute to a better understanding of island society, which is widely heterogeneous from a sociodemographic and linguistic point of view. Secondly, we intend to use this study to reflect on the influence of the social meanings of the different linguistic uses and the underlying mechanisms in this interrelation, in order to better understand whether we have a Madeiran speech community or a plurality of local speech communities, geographical and socially located in the island of Madeira. The results show, that on one hand, Madeiran speakers are aware of the linguistic diversity in the island territory and its social significance, and, on the other hand, there is a tendency of correlation between sociolinguistic variables and social variables (age and level of schooling of participants) that should be considered in future research work.