A marcação da quebra de expectativa no português brasileiro e no português moçambicano: protagonismo de mas e só que

Abstract

In this work, we analyze, from a sociolinguistic perspective, the phenomenon of the breach of expectation in two varieties of the Portuguese language, namely Brazilian Portuguese (BP) and Mozambican Portuguese (MP). The breach of expectation, also called adversativity in the grammatical tradition, refers to coordinated structures capable of canceling a previously established presupposition, breaking what is expected or considered socially habitual and/or predicted (Neves, 2000). This occurs, for example, in “o vizinho fechou a casa, mas os ladrões roubaram a TV” (Perini, 2016, p. 246), in which the second clause, reporting the theft, breaks the expectation of supposed security conveyed in the first clause, since, even though the house was locked, it was still robbed. In our study, we address this phenomenon within the variationist framework. According to Labov (1978), a variable linguistic phenomenon occurs when two or more variants share the same referential or representational value, as seen, for example, with the adversative conjunction mas, present in the previous example, and the adversative conjunctive phrase só que, both of which mark a breach of expectation, as in “o vizinho fechou a casa, só que os ladrões roubaram a TV”. We seek to determine which variants are most commonly used to express the breach of expectation in both varieties and the influence of internal and external factors on this variation. We used speech samples from the C-Oral Brasil I corpus (Raso; Mello, 2012) for the Brazilian variety and the Corporaport corpus (Vieira; Pissurno, 2016) for the Mozambican variety. As external factors, we stratified the samples according to speakers age group, gender, and educational level, as established by extensive sociolinguistic studies. As internal factors, we analyzed the position of the expectation-breaking marker within the compound coordinated clause and whether or not it was preceded by other adversative markers. The occurrences were processed using the statistical program GoldVarb 3.0 in order to obtain a quantitative analysis of the data, which also allowed us to establish a qualitative interpretation of the results. The main results show very similar behavior for the breach of expectation in both varieties, with a predominance of conjunctions and adversative conjunctive phrases in intermediate position, connecting the clauses. We also highlight the predominance of the markers mas and só que in both BP and MP. Finally, we note a greater use of the innovative variant só que among women, speakers aged 26 to 40, and those with a university education, which may indicate the beginning of a linguistic change.