Ausênsia e/ou presença de artigo definido diante de antropônimos na fala dos moradores das cidades de Abre Campo e Matipó: um estudo sociolinguistico

Abstract

Through a sociolinguistic investigation, this work analyses the syntactic variation of the presence or the absence of a definite article before anthroponyms in the speech of townspeople from Abre Campo and Matipó. The present study discusses why two localities that are so close geographically have such distinct patterns in terms of the absence or presence of the definite article before anthroponyms, and it investigates whether speakers from these two towns are aware of such absence or presence of the definite article. This study advances the research developed in 2009, during the master's program; present day speech of urban areas, as well as data from earlier use of language, have been analyzed. It is worth mentioning that the choice of these particular towns is due to the fact that they differ in terms of the use of the definite article before anthroponyms: despite being neighboring towns, Abre Campo tends more toward the use of the definite article with anthroponyms, while Matipó tends more toward the absence of the article. Because they are small towns, one expected to find the pattern of variation verified by Almeida Mendes (2009) for rural speech also in the speech of people from urban areas; for this, the new phase of the research included semi-structured oral interviews with people from urban areas. At the same time, this research examined proceedings, title deeds and testaments registered in these two towns in three time periods from 1875 to 1950, in order to propose hypotheses about how the pattern of each town originated. This research is based on the theoretical propositions of Bynon (1977) and Labov (1994), according to which Historical Linguistics must investigate and describe how changes take place or how he linguistic system preserves a structure.