A estrutura dos clíticos pronominais em complexos verbais: uma análise sociolinguística do português de Moçambique

Abstract

The ordering of clitics in verbal complexes moves the Mozambican variety of Portuguese towards its own autonomy, since it does not strictly follow the patterns of the standard norm, which is based on European Portuguese. While in the standard norm, the variation in pronominal placement occurs according to specific morphosyntactic contexts, such as the presence of proclitic elements, in the Mozambican variety, the linguistic context has little influence on clitic ordering. This variable phenomenon once again arouses the need to recognize an official norm of Portuguese spoken in Mozambique. According to Silva (2022), pronominal placement has already been widely investigated in the Brazilian and Portuguese varieties with data from different modalities (oral and written) and from different perspectives (diachronic and synchronic). However, in the Mozambican variety, there is still little research on the same subject, especially on verbal complexes, possibly due to the lower productivity of these structures compared to simple structures, which are more recurrent in everyday speech (Vieira, 2013). Thus, based on the realistic proposal of discussing the variation of Mozambican Portuguese through the need to recognize an official standard, considering the frequency and consistency of the variants in variation and, with the foundation of the Theory of Variation and Change (Weinreich; Labov; Herzog, 1968 [2006]), this research seeks to analyze pronominal placement in verbal complexes in the Mozambican variety of Portuguese. With this objective, a sample of 15 participants was drawn from speechs from television programs in the cities of Maputo, Beira and Nampula, for quantitative analysis. The results point to a variation in pronominal placement in verbal complexes in the Mozambican variety, with the productivity of the intra-verbal complexe variant with proclisis at V2; thus, the distribution in the other variants depends slightly on linguistic and sociocultural factors. For example, the pre-verbal complexe variant occurs exclusively in the presence of conditionals, while the intra-verbal complexe variant with V1 enclisis is more frequent in absolute sentence beginnings and cases of hypercorrection. In addition, schooling proved to be a relevant factor for the occurrence of both variants (CL V1 V2 and V1-CL V2). On the other hand, social variables such as age, origin, profession and gender did not have a significant impact. The high productivity of proclisis in V2 is an innovation that can be interpreted as a possible change underway in the Mozambican variety of Portuguese, moving in the same direction as the Brazilian variety in which this variant is semi-categorical; and at the same time corroborating the hypothesis of a “continuum between the varieties constituted in a historical context of colonization and expansion of the Portuguese language” (Silva, 2022, p. 124), as defended by Petter (2015) and Avelar and Galves (2014).