A variação pronominal nós e a gente na fala de Fortaleza

Abstract

Sociolinguistics conceives language as an orderly heterogeneous system, formed by structured rules that are subject to variations and changes in space and time, conditioned by linguistic and extralinguistic factors. The present research aims to describe and analyze the pronominal variation nós and a gente in the role of explicit subject in the speech of Fortaleza, capital of the state of Ceará, in the light of the assumptions of the Theory of Variation and Linguistic Change (WEINREICH; LABOV; HERZOG, [1968] 2006) and Labov ([1972] 2008). With this, it seeks to examine the performance of linguistic factors formal parallelism, determination of referent, verbal tense/ nominal forms and the subject's position in relation to the verb and social gender and age group on the choice of one or another form by the speakers of the Projeto Dialetos Sociais Cearenses (“Social Dialects of Ceará Project”) (ARAGÃO; SOARES, 1996), a database collected in the 1980s, between the years 1987 and 1988. The aforementioned corpus consists of spoken language data, composed of 18 informants selected from 11 neighborhoods of Fortaleza. For the statistical treatment of the data, it uses the computer program GoldVarb X (SANKOFF; TAGLIAMONTE; SMITH, 2005), in order to verify the frequency of use and which are the independent factors that are statistically relevant to the phenomenon under study. The general results of this research, whose sample consists of 16 informants, indicate that the form a gente (69.4%) is more used than the pronoun nós (30.6%). Among the linguistic variables selected by the statistical program, the determination of the referent proved to be the most significant in the analysis, followed by the formal parallelism variable. The results of Fortaleza point out that a gente is more used when the referent is generic, indeterminate, whereas the pronoun nós is more frequent in specific, determined contexts. As for the formal parallelism, the results reveal that the factor that most favors the shape of a gente is the previous reference made by „a gente’, that is, the likelihood of using a gente is greater when the formal antecedent is the same. The verbal tenses/ nominal forms “present”, “past imperfect” and “infinitive” favor the form a gente, while the “perfect past tense” favors the presence of the canonical variant nós. The variable position of the subject in relation to the verb favors the form a gente. As for social variables, the results show that the younger age group and men use the innovative variant a gente more often.