A concordância entre sujeito e predicativo do sujeito na fala da comunidade quilombola Muquém AL : estudo sócio-histórico linguístico

Abstract

This dissertation has, as its general objective, a search for linguistic and socio-historical information on Muquém, a community which is regarded as reminiscent of Quilombo dos Palmares, located in União dos Palmares, Alagoas. As regards to the historical search, this work aims at verifying the African role in its linguistic and socio-cultural formation, having, as our basis, the national project proposal for Brazilian Portuguese History (PHPB) and the Linguistics Socio-Historical perspective (MATTOS e SILVA, 2004). As for the linguistic matter, this research has, as its objective, the checking on variation on agreement between subject and its predicative in the current discourse of that community, trying to offer, then, a better understanding on the characteristics of this linguistic phenomenon and their possible changes, using, for such work, the apparatus of the Quantitative Sociolinguistics (Labov, 1994, 2008 [1972]). Before the collected information, it is conjectured that a) the African culture had influence both in the language and in the culture of the Muquém community, b) the use of the non-formal variant will entail a percentage bigger than the one presented in the studies of the urban speech (SCHERRE, 1991; DIAS, 1996; SALGADO, 2008) and c) a change in progress could be occurring toward a greater use of the standard variant. The corpus taken for analysis consists of recorded interviews developed with 12 habitants of the community just mentioned above. As possible conditioning extralinguistic factors, male and female gender and age, subdivided as follows: group I from 10 until 30 years old; group II from 31 until 50 years old; and group III over 50 years old, were chosen. The chosen linguistic factors were: kinds of subject, kinds of predicative, verbal agreement, intervening material between verb and predicative, number nominal agreement in SN subject, reference to the speaker in the discourse and semantic characterization of the subject. The results of the VARBRUL program only showed the following extralinguistic factors verbal agreement, kinds of subject and reference to the speaker in the discourse as statistically active in the variation of agreement between subject and predicative. Based on socio-historical facts related to the origin of the community and to the level of variation in the agreement of that linguistic structure, the importance of the African presence, to the language and culture of that community, was acknowledged.