A ausência de concordância verbal no Vale do Rio Doce/MG

Abstract

The present work analyzes, within the Theory of Variation or VariacionistSociolinguistic, the linguistic variable constituted by the presence and absence of concord between verb and third person plural subject in Braúnas communitys speak, Vale do Rio Doce, Minas Gerais. We assume this variable to be conditioned by groups of linguistic factors (verbs morphological constitution and subject position in relation to the verb) and extralinguistic ones (age and sex). Plus, we test the hypothesis that the absence of verbal concord is the favorite option of the speakersfrom the rural area and from the urban area, independently from their schooling level. In this analysis we use a corpus constituted by 3.642 data extracted from 36 sociolinguistic interviews. We analyze these data quantitatively, using the program VARBRUL (1994) and considering, initially, the six groups of factors. The values on schooling level raised questions, and before them, we excluded the referred group of factors and reanalyzed the data. The results obtained reveal the relevance ofverbs morphological constitution, subjects position in relation to the verb, geographical origin and age, in relation to the absence of verbal concord in the investigated speak. Among the factors that seemed to favor the phenomenon, we point: regular verbs, postponed subject, informants from rural area and informant older than 63.