Sociolinguistics Symposium 19
Freie Universität Berlin | August 21-24, 2012
Programme: accepted abstracts
Abstract ID: 1308
Part of Session 155: Changing linguistic norms in the audiovisual media (Other abstracts in this session)
Language ideology and morpho-syntactic variation in Brazilian telenovelas
Authors: Arden, Mathias
Submitted by: Arden, Mathias (Catholic University Eichstätt, Germany)
Within the Brazilian media landscape, TV Globo, one of the world’s leading networks, stands synonymous for quality production of telenovelas. Among their most successful is the so-called novela urbana, a prime-time format set against the backdrop of modern Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, with plots revolving around every-day concerns of the urban middle and upper-middle classes. There is a common claim among Brazilian linguists that most of the characters portrayed in these novelas make use of a prestigious vernacular form of Brazilian Portuguese (BP), reflecting the spoken norms of educated speakers of major cities.
Given the enormous popularity of telenovelas in Brazil, and the hypothesis of television functioning as a vehicle for the representation and possibly even diffusion of spoken standard varieties, several studies on linguistic change in BP have attempted to correlate the degree of contact with the media (namely telenovelas)and its possible impact on the assimilation of standard language features (Naro & Scherre 1996) or prestigious regional variants (Carvalho 2004).
On the other hand, a recurring theme in the plots of urban telenovelas is the striving for social rise, typically associated with characters depicted as coming from rural areas or the socially disfavored urban periphery, the favelas. The speech of these characters often resembles a stereotypical account of the português popular, a collective expression for the stigmatized vernacular varieties of BP-speakers with little or no formal education.
This fictional rendition of the clash between different social varieties provides a favorable setting for the study of language variation and its ideological implications in the media, the correlation of which to date has remained largely unexplored in Brazilian television. Based on corpus data drawn from the fictional dialogues of two urban telenovelas, the presentation discusses differences in the characters’ use of two morpho-syntactic variables: 3rd person object pronouns, and nominal/ verbal agreement. In Brazilian linguistics these variables have proven useful for classifying registers and social varieties of BP. Building on the concept of second order indexicality of linguistic forms, i.e. the stylistic use of variants by speakers as social symbols (Eckert 2008; Reich 2009), it will be shown how the choice of grammatical forms can project different aspects (personae) of an identity, and therefore contribute to shaping the specific social profile of a fictional character. In a broader perspective, the findings provide empirical evidence for the role of fictional television dialogues in conveying, and possibly even reinforcing attitudes towards linguistic variants.
Bibliography:
Carvalho, Ana Maria (2008): “I speak like the guys on TV: Palatalization and the urbanization of Uruguayan Portuguese”, Language Variation and Change 16.2, p. 127-141.
Eckert, Penelope (2008): “Variation and the Indexical Field”, Journal of Sociolinguistics 12/4, p. 453-476.
Naro, Anthony/ Scherre, Maria Marta Pereira (1996): “Contact with media in linguistic variation”, in: Arnold, J. et al. (ed.), Sociolinguistic variation: Data, theory, and analysis, Stanford, p. 223-228.
Reich, Uli (2009): “Mille plateaux linguistiques – competência poligramatical e socio-indexicalidade em megalópoles latino-americanas”, in: Reich, Uli/ Lopes, Regina (ed.), Variação lingüística em megalópoles latino-americanas, Munich, p. 287-299.