A Escolaridade e a concordância verbal na escrita de menores carentes que vivem em entidades filantrópicas na cidade de Maceió

Abstract

This paper aims at checking changeable traits on the verbal agreement in the language used by socio-financial unprivileged children who live at philanthropic organizations in the city of Maceió, paying particular attention to the variable role of formal schooling. Making use of William Labov’s (2008 [1972]) Variationist Sociolinguistics, we aim at achieving the following objectives: (i) to check if there is variation between absence and presence of verbal agreement marks on the writing of the community in focus; (ii) see what is the variant used in the writing of this community; (iii) to check if there are any linguistic and extra-linguistic factors conditioning that variation, identifying factors conditioning absence and presence of verbal agreement marks; (iv) to verify if formal schooling is a significant variable for the use of such variation in the in the language used by researched speech community; (v) to check if there are similarities or differences in the use of the variation of verbal agreement in the speech data, Santos (2010), and in the writing data of this community. The corpus of this paper is constituted by written productions composed by sixteen informants. For the comparison of the verbal agreement variation use, in the speech and in the writing, we use the written data collected in this research and the speech data collected on Santos’s (2010) research. The qualitative and probabilistic analysis of the compared data was carried out from the GOLDVARB X computer program. While carrying out the present study, it was perceived that (i), (ii), (iii) show variation between absence and presence of verbal agreement marks on the writing of the referred community, that the variant most used is [-conc] and also that variation is motivated by group of factors: formal schooling, distance between subject and verb, nature of the subject and formal parallelism, according to the order of relevance and; (iv) the social variable ‘formal schooling’ is significantly relevant in the language used by researched speech community; (v) there are more similarities than differences.