A variação do TE/LHE em cartas pessoais de cearenses no século XX

Abstract

The linguistic variation is a universal phenomenon that affects all levels of grammar (CAMACHO, 2011). In many languages, of all the word classes, the pronouns, especially the so-called personal pronouns, are more inclined to variation and to rearrangement in the system (MONTEIRO, 1994), although they use to be constituted by a relatively small number of grammatical items, restricted to a kind of closed inventory. The 2nd PERS SING is which more has been coded in a variant way, not only in the Portuguese language, as in many other Indo-European languages, in which there is a dual system of pronouns for 2nd PERS: the T-forms and the V-forms (derived, respectively, from the use of Latin "tu" and "vos") – the first are used both familiarly and informally, while others denote politeness and distance. From the third decade of the twentieth century, with the use of "você" (a V-form) in variation with "tu" (a T-form), the entire pronominal frame of the Portuguese language, including the 2nd PERS possessive, began to undergo change. Assuming the ideas defended by Variationist Sociolinguistics, especially with William Labov (1978, 1983, 1994, 2008), that the linguistic variation occurs motivated by factors both internal and external to the system, this work aims to analyze the variation of forms "te" and "lhe" as 2nd PERS SING, both in accusative and in dative function, in Brazilian Portuguese written in the twentieth century. It uses a sample of 186 personal letters written between 1940 and 2000, obtained in a search among the inhabitants of the town of Quixadá, in the middle of the state of Ceará. The letters are collected from common people, that is, not from language professionals, having been exchanged between friends or relatives. As methodology, the sample was stratified into three periods of the twentieth century in which the letters were written (years 1940’s and 50’s, years 1960’s and 70’s, years 1980’s and 90’s) and gender of authorship (letters from men and letters from women) and submits the data to the computer program GoldVarb X in order to obtain statistical results and interpret these results in light of theories of Sociolinguistics Variationist. The survey results showed that variation of the pronoun forms "te"/"lhe" is conditioned by linguistic factors, such as the form of the verb, the position of the pronoun and the presence of a V-form before "te" or "lhe", and that, although "lhe" was more used than "te" in the letters, its use has declined over the three periods of time analyzed.