O uso dos pronomes pessoais de segunda pessoa do singular na posição de sujeito em cartas pessoais no estado de Alagoas

Abstract

Based on the assumption that language plays a significant role in identifying and demarcating linguistic and social differences within the community, this study aims to analyze the implementation and use of the second person singular personal pronouns tu/você as the subject in the state of Alagoas, to determine how these pronouns were used and the conditioning factors for their occurrence, as well as to investigate how power and solidarity relations influenced the use of these pronouns. For the development of this study, we relied on the Theory of Linguistic Variation and Change (Labov, 2008), Historical Sociolinguistics (Romaine, 2009), and the Theory of Power and Solidarity (Brown; Gilman, 1960). Therefore, our study was conducted through the analysis of personal letters from the 20th century, as this genre significantly facilitates the use of second-person pronouns, enabling a better analysis and understanding of the integration and use of these pronouns in Alagoas. Our corpus consisted of 204 personal letters written by Alagoan correspondents, and from our data analysis, we controlled for the following factors: letter writing period, personal letter subgenre, power and solidarity relationships, relationship between the correspondents' genders, gender of the correspondents, subject realization, verb agreement, and pronominal parallelism. For the statistical data analysis, we used the R computational program (R core team, 2018), and from the analysis and processing of the data, we identified 546 occurrences, of which 262 were of the pronoun tu, accounting for 48%, and 284 of the pronoun você, representing 52%. This confirmed our hypotheses that i) there is variation between the second person singular pronouns in the sample analyzed, with alternation between você and tu; ii) extralinguistic factors such as the letter writing period, personal letter subgenre, relationship between the correspondents' genders, and the gender of the correspondents condition the linguistic choice; iii) Linguistic factors such as subject realization and linguistic parallelism condition the linguistic choice; and iv) the linguistic choice of você and tu made by the correspondents is also influenced by Power and Solidarity relations.