Ter/haver existenciais na escrita de alunos dos ensinos fundamental e médio da cidade de Maceió/AL.

Abstract

This research main goal is to analyze the variable behavior of the Portuguese verbs ter and haver existentials in the written language of secondary school children in the city of Maceió. For this purpose, we take as basis the theoretical fundamentals of the Linguistic Variation Theory (LABOV, 1983), that attempts to investigate, explain and describe the degree of variation of the variable linguistic elements, establishing the relationship between linguistic and social factors and language use. The data for this study were collected in a State School of the capital of the state of Alagoas in Brazil. It comprises of 160 textual productions stratified according to informers' schooling. As we were dealing with mathematical methods, the software package VARBRUL was used for quantitative analysis of the data. Thence linguistic analysis was carried out based on linguistic and social variables, namely, textual theme, textual type, verb tense, animacity of the NS object, nature of the NS object, informers' schooling and gender. Based on the results obtained, we found out that not only is there the variation of ter/haver existentials in the analyzed corpus and that the verb ter is much more extensively used verb haver , but also that such variation is conditioned by schooling and verb tense.