Os advérbios graduadores na fala rural e na fala urbana de Minas Gerais

Abstract

This dissertation aims at analyzing the graders in speech samples from two Brazilian cities in Minas Gerais state, Luisburgo and Belo Horizonte, thus contemplating the two extreme poles of the urbanization continuum, proposed by Bortoni-Ricardo (2004), the rural one and the urban one. Concerning the relation between language, society and culture, this research is based on the works of L. Milroy (1987) and J. Milroy (1992) as well as on the studies of Bortoni-Ricardo (2004), they all associate the speaker linguistic choices to sociocultural issues. The corpora underlying this study are composed of 24 speech samples: 12 interviews from Luisburgo and 12 interviews from Belo Horizonte, collected according to norms advocated in dialectal and sociolinguistic research. The syntactic-semantic relations established by the graders category were described according to the descriptive studies of Ilari et al. (1996 [1990]; 2002 [1992]; 2014), generated from real speech data from Projeto de Estudo da Norma Urbana Culta (NURC - the Urban Standard Language Study Project). It is a well-established theoretical framework developed for years of study on the adverbial category. In addition, the urban data from Belo Horizonte are similar to NURC surveys. As to the connectivity between the grader and its scope, from a syntactic-semantic point of view, this analysis is based on Waugh (1977), which presupposes the “modification situation” established between the contiguous elements in a sentence. An analysis of graders scope, namely, adjective, verb and adverb, according to semantic typologies, was proposed using as reference Dixon (2004) for adjectives, Garcia (2004) for verbs and Ilari et al. (2014) for adverbs. The graders quantitative analysis result demonstrated that in both corpora the predominance of the intensifiers is evident in relation to the attenuators which are in a very small number. As to the grader and its scope, the preferred intensifier order is adjective, verb and adverb; among the attenuators, the preferred order is verb, adjective and adverb. In the analysis of combinatorial graders, the greatest recurrence of the same combination occurs more frequently in rural data and the greatest combinations variety with different lexical items occurs more frequently in urban data. The scopes semantic typology classification analysis showed that there is a diversity of types in both places. The most frequent semantic types are the most general ones: among adjectives, the values classes, human propensity, age and physical property are the most frequent; among verbs, the affective class; and among adverbs, the qualifiers class. As a result of this analysis, it was possible to correlate the use of the graders with the sociocultural characteristics of these speakers’ groups. Similarities and differences were found in the quantification and in the lexical choices between the two localities. Although both have varied and repetitive combinations, the greater recurrence of combinations indicates a vocabulary focused in rural data; and the greater variety of combinations indicates a diffuse vocabulary in urban data.