A segunda pessoa do singular na comunicação digital de empresas alagoanas : a variação entre preenchimento pronominal e sujeito nulo

Abstract

This thesis analyzes the filling versus non-filling of the second person singular when in subject position in digital communication, specifically, on the social network Instagram. Studies such as Duarte (1993, 1995, 2003), Duarte et al., (2012) and Santos, (2014), among others, point to the process of linguistic variation between pronominal filling and the null subject in Brazilian Portuguese, in that regard, our investigation seeks to verify whether the phenomenon is also recurrent in digital communication, specifically in relation to the second person singular, and which factors are determining whether or not this subject position is fulfilled. Evaluating the specific characteristics of this form of language use, we also intend to present the similarities or distinctions with the forms of spoken language in Brazilian Portuguese. For this purpose, we support our investigation considering the theoretical-methodological model of Variationist Sociolinguistics, proposed by Labov (1972), which analyzes the relationships between language and the social context of the linguistic community. Through posts of four companies from the state of Alagoas, we sought to verify how the second person singular is performed in the subject position in the context of digital communication in which the consumer is the direct interlocutor with which each company seeks to carry out communication. The corpus was constituted through data taken from public posts of the official Instagram page of each of the selected companies, from February 2022 to May 2023, seeking to draw up a longitudinal analysis. The independent variables listed for our research were the type of sentence (interrogative and non-interrogative), verbal tense (past and non-past), parallelism and verbal mood (indicative, subjunctive, imperative and personal infinitive). After the collection, the data were statistically processed using the R software. The data points to the predominance of the null subject and the exclusive use of the innovative pronoun “você” in cases of full subject expression. The variables analyzed proved to be influential in terms of the choice between the analyzed variants and the parallelism variable was selected by the R software as the most statistically relevant. The results reveal that, in the digital communication modality, there is a process of stable variation, in which the realizations of using subject completion differ from those found in conventional Portuguese speech and writing.