A alternância subjuntivo / indicativo na fala de Fortaleza: um estudo de tendência de tempo real (1990 - 2020)

Abstract

Within the scope of Brazilian Variationist Sociolinguistics, the alternation of the verbal forms ‘subjunctive’ and ‘indicative’ gained notoriety from the 1980s onwards (Pimpão, 2015), with the advancement of variation studies beyond the phonetic-phonological level. This phenomenon presents a sensitive distribution to linguistic aspects, such as modality (Alves, 2009) and verbal tense (Alves, 2014), and to social aspects, such as schooling (Carvalho, 2007) and location (Santos, 2015). In this sense, our objective is to investigate, based on formal speech data from Fortaleza, the trends in the alternation of the verbal forms of ‘subjunctive’ and ‘indicative’ in completive clauses and their relationships with linguistic and social factors in two synchronies (1990 and 2020). The data were selected from the two phases of the sociolinguistic database “Projeto Descrição do Português Oral Culto de Fortaleza – PORCUFORT”, being the 1990 Sample (Araújo; Viana; Pereira, 2018; Rodrigues; Santos; Viana, 2021) and the 2020 Sample (Rodrigues; Santos; Viana, 2021). Adopting the theoretical perspective of Labovian Sociolinguistics (Labov, 1978, [1994] 1999, [1972] 2008; Weinreich; Labov; Herzog, [1968] 2006), this research’s nature is quantitative, using statistical analysis software, R Studio, and it is characterized as a short-term real-time trend study (Labov, [1994] 1999). Based on a survey of academic works on the phenomenon (Almeida, 2010; Alves Neta, 2000; Alves, 2009; Alves, 2014; Baiocato, 2017; Barbosa, 2011; Bianchet, 1996; Botelho Pereira, 1974; Carvalho, 2007; Costa, 1990; Fagundes , 2007; Lima, 2012; Oliveira, 2006; Oliveira, 2007; Pimpão, 1999, 2012; Reis, 2010; Rocha, 1997; Santos, 2005; Santos, 2014; Vieira, 2007), we selected the following linguistic variables to control in this research: ‘morphology of the verb of the main clause’, ‘morphology of the verb of the subordinate clause’, ‘polarity’, ‘type of verb’, ‘modality’ and ‘temporal projection’. The social variables controlled are the following: ‘sex/gender’ and ‘age group’. We also controlled the ‘informant’ variable to include this aspect in the mixed-effects logistic regression. As for the samples, 24 informants were selected from each phase of PORCUFORT, totaling 48 Dialogue between Informant and Documenter type surveys, stratified by sex and age group. For both samples, the statistical program selected the independent variables ‘type of verb’ and ‘temporal projection’ with an indication of futurity, for the samples from the 1990s and 2020s, and the variable ‘polarity’, for the 2020 sample. The results indicate that the subjunctive mood is associated with opinionated and non-factive predicates, being categorical in volitional predicates, and inhibited in factive predicates. The results of the variable ‘age group’ show a scenario of stable variation in the subjunctive and indicative moods in present-tense completive clauses in Fortaleza’s speech in the two synchronies analyzed.