O perfil sociolinguístico do município de Oliveira Fortes-MG: a concordância nominal e verbal

Abstract

This work surveys the linguistic variation in number agreement in noun phrases (NP) and in verbal phrases (VP) among speakers from Oliveira Fortes-MG aiming to identify the sociolinguistic profile of this community. We have assumed that this town according to its sociohistory and demographic characteristics has a profile underlined by linguistic conservativeness from the perspective that, historically, the variant absence of the explicit number mark is earlier than the variant presence of the explicit number mark in Brazilian Portuguese. This happens because of the country territorial polarization rural/urban. This research is based on the pretext of the Variationist Sociolinguistics (LABOV, 2008 [1972], 1982, 1994, 2001) and, as adevelopment, on studies about Social Networks (MILROY, 1980, 1987, 2004; MILROY & MILROY, 1985; BORTONI- RICARDO, 1985, 2011). For the current investigation, it was collected some data from twenty-four informers throughout sociolinguistics oriented interviews, social forms and social networks. The corpus shows 1,407 occurrences of number agreement variation in noun phrases and 810 occurrences of number variation in verbal phrases. It was seen that there is a predominance of the variant absence of the explicit number mark (89.6% in NPs e 80.6% in VPs). Due to this result, it was possible to reaffirm the initial hypothesis, once it was testified that the linguistic conservativeness in Oliveira Fortes-MG is motivated by particularities of the town and its inhabitant’s social networks settings.