O MAIS CONECTOR NO PORTUGUÊS POPULAR DA BAHIA: ASPECTOS SOCIOLINGUÍSTICOS E FORMAIS

Abstract

This study investigates the change of the adverb more. In popular Portuguese of Bahia State, the function of more is amplified as it acts as a connector in two syntactic contexts: subordination, working as the preposition with, and coordination between DPs, acting as the additive conjunction and. Usage of a single grammatical element playing the role of both comitative particle and coordinator is verified in African, pidgins and creole languages, as well as in Portuguese spoken as L2. However, such usage is not a standard in Indo-European languages. Firstly, I perform a variationist analysis of that observed phenomenon, the connector more. Social and linguistic conditioning for the variation of more in popular Bahiano Portuguese are investigated. More specifically, this analysis focuses on popular Portuguese from the countryside, represented by rural and small town communities (Poções, Santo Antônio de Jesus and Feira de Santana); and on popular urban Portuguese, represented by the neighborhoods in the State capital Salvador (Cajazeiras, Liberdade, Itapuã and Plataforma). Empirical data base comprises 120 samples of vernacular speech belonging to the collection of two research projects on sociolinguistics carried out at Federal University of Bahia and State University of Feira de Santana. Informers are from three age groups and from both genders, in order to identify a propensity to stability or to alteration of the phenomenon at the communities. A total of 2.370 data were sampled and submitted to VARBRUL statistics analysis tool. This research is grounded on the hypothesis that the connector more results from language exchange in Brazil at the first centuries of colonization, and from an evidence that African languages would have affected the Brazilian Portuguese. In order to prove such hypothesis, the path of the connector more is stablished in a continuum of rules of popular Bahiano Portuguese. To do that, I resume the results obtained in a research about Afro-Brazilian Portuguese (GOMES, 2014) spoken in four Afro descendant communities at the countryside of Bahia (Helvécia, Cinzento, Sapé and Rio de Contas) and compare them to the results of the Portuguese spoken in the countryside and in the State capital. Results of the variationist analysis indicate that the phenomenon more/with is changing both in the countryside and the State capital communities. The variant more, resulting from linguistic exchange is being replaced by the standard variant with, due to a linguistic leveling process, in which models from large urban areas are spread to all regions of the country nowadays (LUCCHESI, 2015). On the other hand, the more/and phenomenon is a stable variation. As to the projection of the variant more in the collection of varieties of Portuguese, its presence is more frequent in Afro-Brazilian Portuguese, while this percentage gradually decreases in the rural area communities, in the small town communities, to the other end of the continuum, where there is an urban rule in the State capital. These studies characterize the variant more as a trace of the contact between languages that occurred in the history of Brazil. Furthermore, this thesis discusses the formal dimension of the phenomenon. I have been referring to the coordinative-subordinate(with) alternation as the syntactic toggle between the coordinate and subordinate structures, considering the expression of the group of elements [DP1, DP2, V, connector] and the global meaning of the derivate sentences, in which the DPs sometimes are continuous and sometimes discontinuous. From the association between these syntactic structures, I address two formal issues: i) the traces that might have licensed the usage of the adverb more as a connector in popular Bahiano Portuguese, allowing its usage in coordinate and subordinate(with) structures; ii) the semantic relationship between the DPs participating of the same event, in the comitative structures. For the first issue I propose that maintaining the semantic trace <INCLUSION> and the syntactic trace <RELATIONAL>, in the process of grammaticalization of the adverb more, would have licensed its usage as a connector. As for the second issue, I propose that thematic attribution of com-DP occurs in a continuum scheme where, on one side is the typical comitative, more symmetrical with Suj-DP, to the other edge where is the less symmetrical case, coding only for co-presence in the event. The particle more/with is lexical and contributes to the thematical attribution of com-DP in a scheme of interaction between its basic semantic traces, the properties inherent to the core of the DP introduced by the preposition, and the semantic properties of the event expressed by the verb. The change of the adverb more is analyzed under the perspective of Parametric Sociolinguistics.