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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 493

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

Variation of 2nd person pronouns in Rio de Janeiro/Brazil: social stratification in big cities

Authors: Lopes, Célia Regina dos Santos (1); dos Santos, Viviane Maia (2)
Submitted by: Lopes, Célia Regina dos Santos (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)

Present day Brazilian Portuguese shows variation between tu (you.SG.NOM) and você (a grammaticalized pronoun derived from  Vossa Mercê Your Mercy) in subject position. There are at least three sub-systems of forms of address in subject position: (i) tu (ii) você and (iii) você ~ tu. In some regions the frequency of você is higher or even exclusive while in other regions tu is the most frequent form with (2rd person verb) or without verbal agreement (3rd person verb). In most parts of Brazil however, there is some variation between você and tu. In some places, the new pronoun você  is the neutral less-marked form, whereas the original pronoun tu  is used in higher level of intimacy. In other locations, though, the pronoun tu is the neutral form, while the form você is used to represent politeness.
The aim of this work is to analyze the forms of address tu and você (you) in subject position considering both social and internal factors for the variation and change (WHL, 1968) in the city of Rio de Janeiro, having in mind the preference in usage for the third subsystem in Rio de Janeiro. Moreover, in Rio de Janeiro, the pronoun tu  without agreement is increasingly frequent in directive acts to indicate proximity, intimacy and social identity. However, the social significance of each variable has not yet been described in this urban space. An overall social impression considers that the  pronoun você is a prestige variant, while  tu  is a socially stratified marked-form.
Our problem with this phenomenon is that the interviews based on question-answer sociolinguistic methods cannot capture address forms used by the speakers, because they are exclusively used in the questions by the interviewers. Therefore, based on Labov (1966/2006), the data set for this analysis was extracted from recordings of dialogues with people on the streets: “a systematic use of rapid and anonymous observations in a study of the sociolinguistic structure of the speech community” (Labov, 2006:168). The samples were organized following a similar method used in Labov (1966/2006), by which the interviewer approached the informant on the streets asking for directions to a particular place. The trigger-question was How do I get to the street X? (Como eu chego à rua X). The answer would normally be Tu (or você) vai por essa rua (You-SG-NOM turn into this street). The social constraints regarded the comparison of different occupational groups (manager, salespeople in stores – formal trade - and salespeople from the streets – informal trade) and geographic location.
Despite the scale of social stratification controlled in the samples, there has not been a strong difference in the variation tu~você. The results show, however, some preferences: the variant você is more frequent than tu as a less-marked form among women, whereas the subject pronoun tu is frequent among young man, mainly salespeople from the streets (informal trade).
References:
Labov, W. (2006/1966). The Social Stratification of English in New York City. Cambridge, U.K.: CUP.
Weireinch, U.; W. Labov; M. Herzog. (1968) Empirical Foundations for a Theory of Language Change. University of Texas Press Austin, Texas.