O uso do pronome nulo e do pronome pleno na posição sujeito na língua falada da comunidade quilombola Baixa da Linha no Recôncavo Baiano

Abstract

This thesis analyzes the filling of the subject position in a variety of Portuguese based on a corpus of 909 oral data collected in the rural Afro-Brazilian community Baixa da Linha, in the Bahian Recôncavo region. The speech sample consists of 11 interviews conducted in the community, whose participants were stratified by gender, age, education level, and residence outside the community. Based on the descriptions, the aim is to identify which linguistic and social contexts favor or inhibit the empty category in the subject position, seeking to observe the variable use of the subject filling, in order to investigate the impact of Portuguese's contact with African languages in this region. To this end, the theoretical and methodological framework used was Variationist Sociolinguistics (Weinreich; Labov; Herzog, 2006[1968]; Labov, 1972 [2008]), and the theoretical assumptions of Parametric Sociolinguistics (Tarallo, 1987; Tarallo; Kato, 1989; Duarte, 2016, 2019; Martins; Coelho; Cavalcante, 2015). The gradual loss of the null subject in Brazilian Portuguese was observed by Duarte (1995 [2018]), with the loss of the “avoid pronoun” principle. This change may have been consolidated by the reduction of the verbal inflectional paradigm and by the change in the pronominal system with the entry into the system of the forms você and a gente (Lopes, 2003; Lopes; Brocardo, 2016; Omena, 1986; 1996; Menon, 1994; 1996; Lopes and Cavalcante, 2011). However, it is worth investigating the behavior of this phenomenon in other varieties, such as Afro-Brazilian Portuguese, in order to understand how the socio-historical dynamics of this Afro-Brazilian community, in Recôncavo Baiano, interfered with the filling or not of the subject position. Based on studies already carried out in other Afro-Brazilian communities, such as Lucchesi (2004; 2009); Almeida (2005); Silva (2017), in addition to the relevant work of Duarte (1993; 1995; 2000; 2018, 2019), among others, we seek to discuss aspects such as the social history of the Baixa da Linha community, in the municipality of Cruz das Almas-BA; the influence exerted through contact with other peoples and the effect of Irregular Linguistic Transmission (Lucchesi; Baxter, 2009) as a decisive socio-historical factor for the realization or non- realization of the pronominal subject in Afro-Brazilian Portuguese; identify the contexts of greatest favoritism of the null subject, as well as its possible contexts of resistance; predict possible effects caused by this change in Afro-Brazilian Portuguese. The analysis was based on the set of linguistic properties associated with the Null Subject Parameter, particularly those of Lucchesi (2009) and Duarte (1995, 2012, and 2018). After identifying the occurrences, they were coded and submitted to the Goldvarb X program, which presented the frequencies and relative weights for the investigated variables. The program selected the following groups of factors as relevant: type of sentence, previous mention of the subject, location in relation to the antecedent, and syntactic structure of the sentence. However, despite no social factor having been selected by the program, a clear preference is noted among older speakers for the phonetically filled subject, which confirms the hypothesis that language contact in Brazil altered the structuring of popular varieties of Brazilian Portuguese due to the process of Irregular Linguistic Transmission in their formation, indicating an advanced process of change in the community's grammar with a negative trait to the pro-drop parameter much earlier than the changes that would be observed in standard Brazilian Portuguese (Tarallo, 1993; Duarte, 1993, 1995, 2018).