Demonstrativos no português da Região do Amazonas nos séculos XIX, XX e XXI: um estudo de variação e mudança linguística

Abstract

This is a historical study of the uses of the demonstrative pronouns este, esse and aquele and their inflections in a corpus composed of texts from the genres news and novels of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries produced in the region of Amazonas and, at the same time comparative, considering results of work composed with texts of the same textual genres and periods in the region of Rio de Janeiro. For the development of the work in this diachronic panorama, it is supported by Givón’s theoretical-methodological approach (2001), who considers that the linguistic forms are constantly in conflict, generating an adaptive commitment action between the functional pressures, leading to linguistic change; by Labov (2008), who presents strategies to be used in works that involve linguistic variation and demonstrates that the social and internal structural pressures, which contribute to a linguistic change, can be observed and described and by Kabatek’s idea (2012) who proposes that a text contains several discursive traditions present at the same time and that the mutual relationship between the discursive tradition and the science of linguistic systems is essential for linguistic change. The analyzes and frequencies of the occurrences of the demonstratives este, esse and aquele (and inflections) in the corpus were carried out under the observation of the influences of morphological factors (gender and number), syntactic (order and position in the noun phrase) and semantic-discursive (reference values endophora, exophora, exo-endophora, anamnetic and indeterminate), observing the performance of the demonstrative pronouns in the ternary/binary configuration process over time of the research. During the work, four hypotheses were tested, the first one considered that the news and novel textual genres presented structural changes between the 19th and 21st centuries because they are historically linked to the transformations of amazonense society. This hypothesis was partially confirmed, since it was attested for the news genre, but not clearly for the romance genre. The second hypothesis proposed that structural changes in textual genres allowed an innovation in the use of demonstratives in the news and romance genres, providing the emergence of different uses of demonstratives in relation to those formally established by the system and, as it is associated with the first hypothesis, it was also partially confirmed. The structural change occurred only in the news, that is, with the increase of the oral modality, from the second half of the 20th century in the news, the use of the esse form has also increased as opposed to the disuse of the este form. The third hypothesis of this work considered that, in the Portuguese of the Amazon region, the demonstrative system underwent a reorganization, with the implementation of binarism as opposed to a ternary system. This hypothesis has been fully confirmed, as it was found the rise of the esse form to the opposition of the descent of the este form in both textual genres, leading to consider that the system of demonstrative present in the corpus of the Amazonas region tends to change from ternary to binary (especially in endophoric function). The fourth hypothesis considered that the process of implementing the binarism happened in different times, taking into account the portuguese language in the Amazon region and the portuguese language in the Rio de Janeiro. This hypothesis was also confirmed, in Rio de Janeiro the process of implementing binarism began a little earlier than the state of Amazonas.