A implementação do 'você' no português brasileiro: evidências da língua escrita

Abstract

This paper focuses on the variable use of Tu / Você (“You”) in real time (19th and 20th centuries). The proposal is to conduct a panel study (LABOV, 1994) in written language, by observing the linguistic path of two specific writers through their lifespan: youth, seniority and old age. As pointed out by many researchers, the use of handwritten text sources, such as private letters, play an important role in historical sociolinguistic investigation. The aim of this study is to show how and when the pronominal subject você, an address form in its origin, becomes equivalent to the 2nd pronoun Tu in Brazilian Portuguese. The starting hypothesis rests on the fact that implementation of Você in Brazilian Portuguese might reveal a correlation to the use of Usted, in South America Spanish, through a grammaticalization process that took place earlier in Spanish than in Portuguese. Based on written language, we come to the conclusion that (i) the implementation of Você extended over almost a century; (ii) the use is almost categorical by the end of the 1940s; and (iii) the two writers reveal similar behaviour however divergent patterns of use that, could be explained by one of the nuns’ having always lived in Brazil (MJ), in close knit social nets, and, the other (MR), in Spanish countries, in loose knit social nets.