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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 163

Thematic Session (Papers belonging to this Thematic Session)

Variation and change in the city of Rio de Janeiro

Authors: dos Santos Lopes, Célia Regina; de Oliveira Cavalcante, Silvia Regina
Submitted by: de Oliveira Cavalcante, Silvia Regina (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)

Rio de Janeiro is the 15^th biggest city in the world, with a population of about 6,5 million people living in a very heterogeneous and unequal socio-economical scenario. This megacity may be a fertile soil for discussions about language variation and change in the city concerning the methodological issues that arise in doing present day sociolinguistics field work. In this sense, this Thematic Session proposes to discuss linguistic variation and change considering the vicissitudes of Rio de Janeiro both in synchronic and diachronic perspectives. In order to do so, we count on different corpora available for research that have been organized following sociolinguistic patterns, such as age, gender, level of education, place of living in Rio de Janeiro, date of recording. The data for analysis come from different corpora, built with specific purposes. On one side, we take into consideration three major corpora built between 1970 and 2011 with informants born in Rio de Janeiro with different levels of education: NURC (http://www.letras.ufrj.br/nurc-rj/), PEUL (http://www.letras.ufrj.br/peul/) and Concordância (http://www.letras.ufrj.br/concordancia/). And, based on Labov (1972, p. 43-44), we will analyze a sample of “anonymous observations in public places”, specific for the study of pronominal forms of address. The main goals of this thematic session are (1) to discuss grammatical variation in the spoken variety of Rio de Janeiro, considering the socio-historical conditions inherent to this megacity; (2) to present apparent and real time studies of different variable phenomena; (3) to compare the carioca variety of Brazilian Portuguese with other urban varieties, such as European Portuguese and African Portuguese varieties; (4) to raise methodological issues concerning the sociolinguistic investigation held in megacities; (5) to discuss the impact of the changes in the socio-demographic structure and the population mobility in linguistic phenomena. We encourage abstracts that discuss variable phenomena in the city of Rio de Janeiro, especially the ones related to the main goals of this session. We also encourage panel and trend studies of linguistic phenomena connected with the socioeconomic and demographic scenario of Rio de Janeiro in the past 40 years. Besides that, we promote the integration of sociolinguists with historians and anthropologists in order to understand the correlation between language and society.