A emergência de pronomes não binários no português brasileiro: um estudo exploratório

Abstract

The transformations in the field of identity of individuals are reaching Brazilian Portuguese (hereinafter BP), emphasizing the need for an expansion of gender markers and reference for individuals in the language. Consequently, binary values - male and female - have proven to be limited in the face of new identities, thus driving the use of non-binary language in BP. Therefore, the present study aims to verify and analyze the use of a third gender marker in BP, carried out through the use of neopronouns, such as in the elu, ile, ilu, and el systems, and the expansion of distinctive gender markers in the language, such as the use of -e at the end of words. The justification for this research is based on the novelty of the phenomenon in the language and, consequently, in linguistic studies, forming a new research problem. To do so, we rely on studies on the grammatical gender category developed by Camara Jr. (1970), Rocha (1998), Corbett (1991), Carvalho (2020), as well as grammatical studies by Bechara (1997; 2010), Neves (2000), Perini (2005), Castilho (2010), Cunha and Cintra (2017). Benveniste's (1995) studies on the pronoun class are also highlighted to understand the implementation of neopronouns and their relation to a third gender in the language. In addition to Hall's (2006) work that addresses issues of subject identity. Thus, with the characterization and objective of an exploratory study, based on the novelty of the phenomenon, data collection was carried out over a period of three months from some neopronoun systems on Twitter, through a scraping procedure, which involves searching for keywords. Therefore, the analysis corpus consisted of 364 samples of neopronouns, and these data were subjected to statistical analysis through the R platform, based on variables: the proportion of neopronoun system usage to determine if a specific system is more commonly used; semantics, analyzing whether neopronoun usage is more marked for a generic referent recovery; syntactic function, aiming to observe if there is a connection between syntactic function and specific neopronoun systems; non-binary gender inflection to analyze if neopronoun usage impacts agreement, and system co-occurrence, checking if neopronoun systems and canonical pronouns co-occur in the same construction. As a result, it was observed that the elu system had a higher frequency of usage and, therefore, a greater implementation possibility. Additionally, the use of neopronouns in BP showed greater relevance for a generic reference of individuals, recovering binary and non-binary identities in the language. Finally, neopronouns had little impact on agreement relationships, agreeing more with canonical gender values; however, in cases where there was non-binary use of gender value, the -e had a higher proportion of usage.