A concordância nominal de número no português falado em Montes Claros - MG: a influência dos nomes gerais em uma análise variacionista

Abstract

In this thesis, we analyze the variation in noun phrase number agreement in oral data of the municipality of Montes Claros – MG, from the theoretical-methodological framework of Variationist Sociolinguistics (LABOV, 2008 [1972]). For this, we adopted the hypothesis that this is a phenomenon that represents a case of stable variation in the aforementioned speech community, and that linguistic and social factors motivate this variation. As specific objectives, we have made comparisons of our results with those of other researches that have already been developed on the subject, considering that this is a phenomenon that has already been widely explored in Brazilian Portuguese. In addition, we sought to verify the influence of general nouns (AMARAL and RAMOS, 2014) as a nominal class that drives the absence of number agreement within NP. We conducted 24 recordings of sociolinguistic interviews, which were transcribed and coded for statistical analysis in the GoldVarb X computer program. Our analysis is divided into two parts: in the first, called non atomistic, we analyze a total of 3,735 NPs. In the second part, which consists of atomistic analysis, we take for analysis 7,297 flexible elements of NP. In the non-atomistic analysis, the percentage of application of the concordance rule occurs in 71.1% of the data, and the factors selected by the program, in this perspective of analysis, are education level, age range, gender, animacity of the referent, degree of nuclear element and location of NP in relation to the verb, in this order of relevance. In the atomistic analysis, the percentage of maintaining marks of agreement in the elements is 84.7%. In this part of the analysis, the program has selected the following factors: position of the element in the NP, tonicity of the element, grammatical class of the element, phonic salience of the element and phonetic-phonological context in this order. Regarding the social factors, we verified a great importance of the informant's level of education, with a high percentage of application of the concordance rule in the speech of informants with higher education (relative weight of 0.749). With regard to linguistic factors, the position of the element in the NP stands out in relation to the other factors, since the percentage for retention of the concordance marks in the first position is 0.829. With regard to general nouns, we identified the following names in the corpus in the plural context: pessoa ‘person’, coisa ‘thing’, trem ‘stuff’, povo ‘people’, negócio ‘business’ and cara ‘guy’, whereas trem, povo and cara did not receive the agreement mark in any of the occurrences. We verified that person favors the presence of agreement in relation to thing and business. The general nouns with the [+animate] and [+human] traits favor the application of the agreement rule in relation to the names that have [–animate] traits. With this study, we hope to contribute to the set of works dealing with agreement from a variationist perspective and to the discussions about general nouns, in addition to leaving a research contribution in Portuguese from the North of Minas Gerais.