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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 219

Part of Session 163: Variation and change in the city of Rio de Janeiro (Other abstracts in this session)

Nominal agreement: urban varieties of Portuguese in contrast

Authors: Brandão, Silvia Figueiredo
Submitted by: Brandão, Silvia Figueiredo (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)

Questions concerning the loss of inflectional morphology and rules of agreement are important parameters for defining the status of varieties emerging from the contact between linguistically and culturally distinct populations. In this sense, studies about nominal and verbal agreement have served as the basis for the formulation of different interpretations about the emergence and development of varieties of Portuguese, as well as to characterize the Portuguese-based creoles.

In the last three years, studies performed under the Project Study of agreement patterns in African, European and Brazilian varieties have demonstrated that, in urban areas, there are high rates of canonical agreement, both nominal and verbal, although we find similar social and structural constraints to the non-implementation of the number morpheme when confronting certain national varieties.

In the current study, carried out according to the theoretical and methodological assumptions of variational sociolinguistics, and based on representative corpora of European Portuguese (EP), Brazilian Portuguese (BP) and Portuguese of São Tomé (PST), we intend (i) to highlight similarities/differences regarding the non-implementation of the plural number mark in NP in the speech of individuals living in urban areas, (ii) in order to discuss, the status (categorical, semi-categorical or variable), as proposed by Labov (2003), of the agreement rule in each variety.

The sample takes into account 54 informants (18 per variety) distributed by sex, three age groups and two levels of instruction and monitoring eight linguistic variables in addition to those three social variables.

We assume the following hypotheses: (i) structural constraints that operate in some varieties of Portuguese refer to components of cognitive-processual nature which reveal themselves in sound, syntactic and semantic levels, which could occur within any language; (ii) external factors, whose actuation must be interpreted in light of the socio-history of each variety, are the key elements for the implementation of such restrictions.

LABOV, W. 2003. Some sociolinguistic principles. In Paulston, C. B. & Tucker, G. R. (org.). Sociolinguistics: the essential readings, 235-250. Oxford: Blackwell.