A CONCORDÂNCIA NOMINAL DE NÚMERO NO PORTUGUÊS DO INTERIOR DA BAHIA: INTERFERÊNCIA DO CONTATO ENTRE LÍNGUAS?

Abstract

In this study, I analyze the variation in the use of number agreement in the noun phrase (NA) in popular Portuguese in the inland cities of Bahia (headquarters and rural areas) in the cities of Poções and Santo Antônio de Jesus, aiming the discussion of the sociolinguistic status of this phenomenon in a linguistic continuum (BORTONIRICARDO, 1998, 2005; LUCCHESI, 2015), which on one side is Bahian Afro-Brazilian rural Portuguese (ANDRADE, 2003, 2006; BAXTER, 2009) and on the other, the urban popular Portuguese of Salvador (LOPES, 2001). According to Lucchesi (2000), the phenomenon of NA affects both extremes of cultured and popular linguistic norms, polarizing them: the application of the NA rule is much more favored in urban communities and disadvantaged in rural areas. The main hypothesis of this work is that Portuguese from the inland cities of Bahia is an intermediate variety, considering that the communities under study maintain contact with these two linguistic norms. Using Variationist Sociolinguistics (LABOV, 2008 [1972]) as a theoreticalmethodological referential, I verify the behavior of linguistic and extralinguistic variables in the use of NA in the corpus of Portuguese in the inland cities of Bahia, a collection of the Projeto Vertentes (Federal University of Bahia). I analyzed the speech data of 48 male and female informants, with little or no schooling, distributed in three age groups (25-35; 45-55; over 65 years old), using the statistical treatment of the R (R) program. Core Team, 2021), with the RStudio interface. The general results confirm the hypothesis raised, since the percentage of application of the NA rule made up 17.3% of the data, being intermediate to the results of Afro-Brazilian Portuguese and Salvador’s Portuguese. Furthermore, in the rural area of the communities under study, the application of the rule is less favored, a behavior similar to what is observed in BP in general. Among the linguistic variables, the syntagmatic configuration of the NP and the number of inflectable NP constituents stand out, revealing that the presence of an item with a semantic plural value favors agreement. The result of phonic salience differs from most studies on NA. As for the phonic salience variable, the result obtained demonstrates that it does not favor the application of the rule, contrary to some works on the subject (LOPES, 2001; ANDRADE, 2006). Statistical analysis of social variables indicates that men are more in agreement than women, and that the school does not play such a strong role as an agent of diffusion of the prestige norm. The age group results indicate an acquisition trend with younger speakers applying the agreement rule more than older ones. To explain the correlation between the typological characteristics of Portuguese and the Bantu languages, I adopt the perspective of the evolution of languages from the competition and selection of features (MUFWENE, 2002, 2008) and the null theory (ABOH, 2015; ABOH and DEGRAFF, 2017). I argue that, during the period of colonization of Brazil, there would have been a process of grammatical reanalysis in the acquisition of Portuguese as a second language in which the prefixes of the Bantu languages were reinterpreted following the initial maintenance of the grammar of agglutination of the functional elements observed in the Bantu languages, which would justify marking the plural only in the first element of the NP.