Variação na concordância verbal no português da comunidade de Almoxarife, São Tomé (África)

Abstract

This dissertation studies variation in verbal agreement in the first-person plural (P4) of the Portuguese spoken in the Almoxarife community (PA), located in São Tomé, Africa. The purpose is to discuss the sociolinguistic status of this characteristic of this variety of African Portuguese within the framework of Labovian Variationist Sociolinguistics. A discussion of previous studies on the P4 variable in varieties of Brazilian Portuguese (BP) are discussed, provides the theoretical end methodological matrix for the present study, as well as points of comparison for the results of the eventual analysis. The study is based on the premise that these varieties of Portuguese are characterized by a reduction in inflectional morphology, caused by language contact and second language acquisition. As such, it is assumed that social and historical factors, and aspects of Universal Grammar resulted in the emergence of a variety of restructured Portuguese in the Almoxarife community. Forthe data analysis, the study uses the GoldVarb (2001) statistical package, which permits identification of the linguistic and extralinguistic variables that influence P4 agreement in this variety of Portuguese. 18 interviews were analyzed: 9 of male respondents and 9 of females. It was found that verb agreement rule of first person plural is applied at a frequency of 73, 6% in contrast with a non-application frequency of 26, 4%, contrary to the general hypothesis adopted in the study, that the speakers would make little use of plural agreement on the verb. In relation to the community grammar, the quantitative analysis revealed that P4 agreement is most favoured when the subject is absent and when the morphophonological difference between the singular and plural forms of verb is most salient. With regard to the social embedding of the variation, the data revealed that younger speakers most favoured the agreement rule while, in general, the men favoured the rule more than did the women. Comparison of the results with those of Brazilian studies revealed that PA, which has São Tomé Creole Portuguese as its substrate , displays patterns of variation similar to thos found in varieties of BP, the latter being linguistic varieties which emerged from a situation of contact between Portuguese and African languages, and through irregular language transmission.