Porque os homens fogem todos para a França e as mulheres é que tem de cavar as vinhas: uma análise sociolinguística e filológica de cartas de mulheres portuguesas do século XX

Abstract

This dissertation presents a philological and sociolinguistic approach to letters written by Portuguese women in the 20th century, examining the second-person pronominal forms tu and você, as well as the graphematic phenomena found in the manuscripts. Based on a philological- linguistic perspective, the study acknowledges the issues surrounding authorship and

authenticity, considering the presence of amanuenses and multiple hands in the letters. The corpus consists of 53 letters, totaling 362 occurrences of second-person pronouns, and the results suggest a predominance of tu (97.8%), while você occurred in only 2.2% of the data, confirming the hypothesis that, in European Portuguese, tu functions as a stable pattern within that speech community. However, although there is homogeneity in the preference for tu with regard to address pronouns, expressive divergences were observed in the graphematic dimension among the writers. In this sense, the results indicate traces of orality, possible dialectal features, and different levels of literacy among the letter writers. The quantitative analysis reveals that, although there is uniformity at the morphosyntactic level, the writing exhibits divergent linguistic behaviors. Therefore, the study highlights the importance of analyzing not only the morphosyntactic dimension but also aspects related to graphical traits, which may reveal linguistic behaviors that would not be captured within a single scope. Thus, the research contributes to a broader understanding of linguistic variation and feminine writing in European Portuguese of the 20th century.