Uso variável dos artigos definidos antes de possessivos em cartas pessoais do sertão baiano (século XX)

Abstract

It is presented in this thesis an analysis of the variation in the use of definite articles before possessive pronouns in 91 personal letters written by 43 writers throughout the 20th century (1906-2000). These writers had low levels of formal education, they were from the rural areas of the following municipalities of Bahia: Riachão do Jacuípe, Conceição do Coité and Ichu – corpus edited by Santiago (2012). The research was developed from the assumptions of Sociohistorical Linguistics (MATTOS E SILVA, 2008) and based on the theoreticalmethodological apparatus of Quantitative Sociolinguistics (WEINREICH, LABOV, HERZOG, 2006 [1968]; LABOV, 2008 [1972]) and sought to uncover the linguistic and social factors which are decisive for the combination of the article with the possessive pronoun in the analyzed corpus. In relation to the relevant linguistic contexts, it was found that the marking of the article is influenced by semantic, morphological and syntactic factors and that the structure of the constituent in which the possessive pronoun is performed also exerts some influence on the presence of the article. The variation in the use of the article before the possessive pronoun in the corpus also has a social basis, highlighted by the statistical importance of the groups birthplace of the sender, location when writing the letters, date of writing of the missives and also the genre of the writer. In addition, comparative analyzes were performed between the results of this thesis and the studies of Floripi (2008) and Callou and Silva (1997). The comparison with the data of Floripi (2008) revealed that the use of the article in the corpus of this dissertation differs from the behavior of this phenomenon in classical Portuguese, both as regards the rates of use of the determinant and in relation to the linguistic contexts observed. It is added that, due to the limitations of the analyzed sample, it was not possible to postulate the existence of a grammatical competition framework for the variation of the use of the article in the Bahian letters of the 20th century. The comparison with the study by Callou and Silva (1997) suggests that, regarding the relevant contexts for the presence of the article before possessive pronouns, there seems to be more similarities than differences between the cult and popular poles of Brazilian Portuguese. Anthropometry data do not constitute a variation context for the use of the article defined in the corpus examined, and the absence of the categorical article in this case. From this behavior emerges one of the original results of this dissertation: in the corpus analyzed, the variations in the use of the definite article before possessives pronouns and anthroponyms seem to constitute distinct grammatical phenomena.