Tu e você em cinco estados do Nordeste a partir dos dados do Projeto Atlas Linguístico do Brasil: um estudo variacionista

Abstract

Given the need to expand dialectal and sociolinguistics studies on the linguistic reality of Northeast Brazilian, we tried to take a geo-sociolinguistic photograph of the Portuguese spoken in five States in that region: Rio Grande do Norte, Paraiba, Pernambuco, Alagoas and Sergipe in relation the use of these treatment forms tu and você. Our general objective is to investigate these uses at the mentioned states from the analysis of extract of ALiB corpus, focusing on all questionnaires (prosody questions, semantic-lexical questionnaire, morphosyntactic questionnaire, topics for semi-directed speech and metalinguistic questions), except the Phonetic-Phonological Questionnaire. As specific objectives, we aim do it at: (i) to analyze the relevance of social variables – location, age, gender, education – in the behavior of speakers about the use of tu and você forms; (ii) to analyze the relevance of language variation – part of this inquiry, type of reference, syntactic function of the variant, verbal time and parallelism – in the occurrence of the tu and você forms; (iii) to represent the use of the forms under study in order to delineate the dialectal reality in the analyzed northeastern states; (iv) to observe how the tu and você forms are distributed, in each location, among informants. Our sample includes date analysis of 140 informants, it achieves the capitals of five states and 25 towns, they total 30 places. The informants were distributed between both sexes, two age groups (18 to 30 years old, and 50 to 65 years old) and two levels of education (up to elementary school II and university). The university level is controlled only in the capitals. The central hypothesis of the work is based on the assumption about the speakers from Northeast region that live in the downtown prefer the pronoun tu, and residents of the capitals prefer the use of você. The study was carried out according to the theoretical assumptions of Contemporary multidimensional Dialectology and Variationist Sociolinguistics, which prioritizes the general principles for the study of language change described by Weinreich, Labov and Herzog (2006 [1968]), that is the variation is inherent to the language, it is systematic and it’s conditioned by interlinguistic and extralinguistic factors. The analysis of the data and the results of statistical calculations were carried out with the aid of the GoldVarb X package. Regarding the interpretation of the data, two analyzes were carried out: a general one, including all the states studied and the other from each state separately. In the general analysis, we obtained a total of 1,995 occurrences of second-person pronouns, being 1,769 contexts with the use of você (88.7%) and 226 uses of tu (11.3%). Even with a small number of tu pronoun in the sample investigated, we focus our analysis on clarify the contexts in which this pronoun still persists. The GoldVarb X binary round pointed out as relevant variables in the use of tu: referencing, part of the inquiry, location and schooling. In the description of the analysis by state, the variables selected as significant were: in Pernambuco – in referencing, part of the inquiry, age group and location; in Paraíba - part of the inquiry, age group and location; in Alagoas – gender and type of questionnaire; in Rio Grande do Norte and Sergipe there were no variables selected.