A variação dos pronomes nós e a gente em função de sujeito em duas variedades africanas do português: um estudo sociolinguístico

Abstract

This quantitative and qualitative research aims to analyze the variation between the pronouns nós and a gente as subjects in urban varieties of Mozambican Portuguese (MP) and Santomean Portuguese (STP), with the main objective of determining the linguistic and social factors that condition the use of the pronoun a gente in place of nós. It also aims to assess the stage of implementation of the innovative variant in each of the research areas, as well as the possible influence of national languages on the performance of the interviewees. To this end, the theoretical and methodological apparatus of the Theory of Variation and Change (Weinreich, Labov; Herzog, 2006 [1968]) and Variationist Sociolinguistics (Labov, 2008 [1972]) is used. The corpora used as the basis for this investigation includes data from eighteen interviews from the Corpus Moçambique-Port (Vieira; Pissurno, 2016), belonging to the project “Comparative study of agreement patterns in african, brazilian and european varieties of Portuguese”; and seventeen interviews from the Project “Variedades do Português”– VAPOR, from the Linguistics Center of the University of Lisbon. Informants from both varieties were classified according to sex, three age groups, and three levels of education. Due to the multilingualism that characterizes the studied areas, the variables “Status of Portuguese” (L1 or L2) and “Individual’s language(s) of intercommunication” were controlled for the classification of mozambicans, while for the stratification of santomean informants, the variable “Frequency of use of a creole” was added. Five structural variables were also considered. The results, obtained using the statistical program GoldVarb-X, reveal the conservative behavior of the MP and STP informants, since the variant a gente expresso reached rates of 6.9% in the MP and 20.1% in the STP variety. It is observed that, in the MP, a gente expresso has a higher probability of occurrence in the discourse of individuals with medium education (p.r. .71) and aged between 36 and 55 years (p.r. .68). In the STP, the innovative form has higher rates in the speech of women (p.r. .66) and among those with primary education (p.r. .64). Additionally, the frequency of the expressed forms of nós and a gente in each of the informants is analyzed, as well as the role of social variables in the two samples.