Concordância verbal de número no português brasileiro: a realidade de comunidades quilombolas alagoanas

Abstract

This paper investigates the phenomenon of verbal number agreement (CV) in Brazilian Portuguese (PB), based on the linguistic and social behavior of speakers from quilombola communities in Alagoas, namely: Muquém, in União dos Palmares; Filús, Jussara and Mariana, in Santana do Mundaú; Gurgumba and Sabalangá, in Viçosa. These communities were selected for analysis in view of the scarcity of linguistic works on them and the need to describe varieties of PB for the process of socio-historical reconstruction of that language. To this end, we conducted a collection of spontaneous speech data in 2009 and in 2015 in these communities based on individual interviews scheduled with 12 employees of each one according to the selection criteria: sex (female and male) and age (from 15 to 30 years, from 31 to 50 years and from 51 years onwards) - counting 72 interviews in all, recorded and transcribed orthographically. Starting from the assumption of variation between explicit variants (presence of verbal number agreement) and zero variants (absence of verbal number agreement) in the speech of these communities, we move towards their description and analysis in the light of the theoretical and methodological assumptions of Variationist Sociolinguistics, by William Labov (2008 [1972]) with the objective of checking how this variation process occurs, which factors internal and external to the linguistic system would be conditioning the use of the explicit variant in detriment of the zero variant. From the groups of linguistic factors related to the verb phrase, we selected only the phonic salience of the verb, with the factor 'most prominent verbs', that is, more noticeable phonetically in the singular / plural opposition (as is / are) and the factor' less verbs salient, 'that is, less noticeable phonetically in singular / plural opposition (as you like / like); from the linguistic factors related to the subject noun phrase (SN-subject), we select: position of the subject in relation to the verb (subject before the verb and subject after the verb); intervening elements between subject and verb in the sentence, presence or absence of words that distance the subject from the verb in the sentence, (with intervening elements or without intervening elements); person, which refers to the person of the speech that constitutes the subject of the sentence (1st person plural, 2nd person plural, 3rd person plural); nature of the subject with regard to the type of subject of the sentence (simple subject and compound subject); nominal agreement in the subject (with, without and does not apply). From the groups of social factors, we highlight: sex (female and male), age (from 15 to 30 years, from 31 to 50 years and from 51 years old), education (from 0 to 5 years of schooling, from 6 to 10 years) and from 11 years onwards) and community (Filús, Gurgumba, Jussara, Mariana, Muquém, Sabalangá). In this context, the variables that proved to be statistically significant for the conditioning of the explicit variant, which in this process is also considered the standard variant, were: subject's position in relation to the verb and intervening elements between amalgamated subject and verb; nominal agreement in the subject; phonic salience of the verb; grouped person and nature and the interaction between community, sex and age - which responded more significantly to the problem investigated together and not separately.