A concordância de número em predicativos do sujeito: variação linguística em Fortaleza

Abstract

This work aims, primarily, to describe and analyze the occurrences of number agreement variations in subject predicative in speakers from the city of Fortaleza. For that purpose, we adopt Variationist Sociolinguistics (LABOV, 1966; 1972; 2001) as the theoretical basis. We set as a starting the knowledge of noun agreement in subject predicatives in the normative grammar in the Portuguese language described in the grammars by Cunha; Cintra (1985) and Bechara (1989). We adopt as basis for our research studies on number agreement in Brazilian Portuguese realized by Scherre (1988), Scherre; Naro (1998) and Scherre (2014. For data gathering, we used the NORPOFOR (Norma Oral do Português Popular de Fortaleza) project, from which we selected a sample of 48 informants stratified by sex (male and female), years of educations (0-8 years and 9-11 years) and type of register (informal (D2) and formal (EF)). For the statistical analysis of data, we utilized the program GoldVarb X (SANKOFF; TAGLIAMONTE; SMITH, 2005), which provides statistical results for spoken language for data analysis, from a binary model of dependent variable, selecting the variables which are shown to be statistically significant to the studied phenomenon. Next, we applied the subjective reaction test to 300 students of several courses in the three main areas of studies – Human Sciences, Physical Sciences and Biological Sciences – at Universidade Federal do Ceará. From this data collection, we investigated how the speakers from Fortaleza the variable phenomenon in question. The factors selected as statistically relevant were the speakers sex, formal parallelism, formal characteristics of the verb in the sentence and formal characteristics of the subject in the sentence. We have concluded, in general, that female speakers tend to be more conservative in relation to number agreement in subject predicatives, confirming our hypothesis, based on the theories by Labov (2001), and the results obtained by Scherre (1991) and Dias (1996). We also concluded that the type of register, formal or informal, although not selected by the statistical program as a relevant variable, is shown to be relevant to some independent variables, especially those related to phonic salience, such as tonicity of the regular items and morphophonological process of plural formation. With the subjective reaction tests, we realized that, contrary to our hypothesis, students from the Physical Sciences tend to be more linguistically conservative than those of Biological and Human Sciences, regarding the phenomenon studied by us. We can also affirm that more salient items, both phonically and by being less usual, tend to be evaluated more negativelly in their plural form without explicit plural marks. In general, we understand that we linguistic evaluation tests indicate that the lack of number agreement in subject predicatives in the city of Fortaleza is negatively evaluated, even in informal situations.