Padrões de alternância pronominal e de concordância verbal da primeira pessoa do plural no falar culto de Fortaleza: uma análise em tempo real de curta duração

Abstract

Based on the theoretical-methodological framework used by the Theory of Linguistic Variation and Change, outlined by Weinreich, Labov and Herzog (1968) and by Labov (1997, 2001, 2003), this research aims to analyze and describe, in real time, the patterns of pronoun alternation and the patterns of verbal agreement with the pronouns nós and a gente in the cultured speech of Fortaleza. To this end, we used a sample composed of 104 informants from the Projeto Português Oral Culto de Fortaleza (PORCUFORT), with 50 informants taken from Phase I of the project, with recordings made between 1993 and 1995 (1990s), and another 54 informants taken from Phase II of the project, with interviews conducted between 2018 and 2022 (2020s). Our sample was socially stratified according to the type of survey (DID – dialogue between informant and documenter; D2 – dialogue between two informants; and EF – formal utterances), sex (man and woman), age group (22 to 35 years old; 36 to 55 years old; and 56 years old and older), and decade of recording (1990 and 2020). To analyze pronoun alternation, we controlled the predictors degree of pronoun referentiality, verb type, formal parallelism, verb tense, and phonic salience. Regarding the patterns of verbal agreement with first-person plural pronouns, we observed the performance of the variables tense and verbal paradigm of the indicative mood, verb structure, verb conjugation, and verb tonicity. Through the R programming language, through the R Studio software, we obtained a total of 4,575 observations of nós and a gente. In the 1990 Sample, the analysis indicated a higher proportion of a gente (58.3%) to the detriment of nós (41.7%). In the 2020s, the analysis identified an even higher use of a gente (79.95%), and a lower recurrence of nós (20.05%). On the other hand, the analysis of verbal agreement counted 4,574 occurrences. In the 1990s, 1,957 data were recorded, distributed as follows: a gente without -mos (58.2%), nós with -mos (41%), nós without -mos (0.7%), and a gente with -mos (0.1%). In the 2020s, there was a significant increase in the emerging pattern, a slight increase in non-standard agreement, and a significant decrease in the use of the standard agreement structure, distributed as follows: a gente without -mos (79.5%), nós with -mos (19.1%), nós without -mos (1%), and a gente with -mos (0.5%). In general, there was a decrease in the proportion of use of nós with -mos in all contexts observed. The short-term real-time analysis indicated a clear expansion of the innovative pronoun a gente, benefiting in the contexts analyzed with greater intensity in the 2020 Sample, and more discreetly in the data from the 1990 Sample. These results demonstrate that the innovative variant becomes more evident with each decade, being preferred in all age groups in the current decade. Despite the

strong expansion of the pronoun a gente and its emerging agreement structure in the formal speech of Fortaleza, the results point to a certain stability in the variation.