A Concordância Nominal de Número no Português Falado em Macapá-AP

Abstract

The present study aims to investigate the use of nominal number agreement in the spoken Portuguese in Macapá-AP. Sociolinguistic studies have shown that this phenomenon presents linguistic variation, that is, the same speaker can oscillate between the formal plural marks and their absence, depending on the communicative context in which he finds himself: formal or informal (Nina, 1980, Scherre, 1988; Naro; Scherre, 2006; Brandão, 2011; Martins, 2010; Ribeiro, 2019). In line with this, this research is based on Variationist Sociolinguistics (Labov, 2008) and relies on the oral database of the Project Linguistic Varieties Spoken in Amapá. Thus, a total of 16 informants were selected, considering the following social factors: gender (female and male), age (generation A: 16-30 years and generation B: over 40 years) and schooling (elementary and high school). We also consider linguistic factors such as: the position of the element within the noun phrase (pre-nuclear, nuclear, and post-nuclear positions) and the location of the noun phrase in relation to the verb (left, right, or indistinct). For sociolinguistic analysis, we used the statistical program goldvarb X, which showed a total of 1,033 occurrences of noun phrases. Of this number, we obtained 75.4% of plural brand accomplishments and 24.6% of absences. We identified that the social factors age and schooling are susceptible to the maintenance of number marks; In addition, with regard to linguistic factors, the pre-nuclear elements and the SNs located to the left of the verb tend to condition the nominal number agreement in the speech of Macapaenses.