Banca de DEFESA: THAMIRIS SANTANA COELHO ASSIS

Uma banca de DEFESA de DOUTORADO foi cadastrada pelo programa.
STUDENT : THAMIRIS SANTANA COELHO ASSIS
DATE: 27/06/2022
TIME: 09:00
LOCAL: Sala de defesas do ILUFBA - Híbrida
TITLE:

THE NOMINAL AGREEMENT OF NUMBER IN PORTUGUESE IN THE INTERIOR OF BAHIA:

INTERFERENCE FROM CONTACT BETWEEN LANGUAGES?

KEY WORDS:

Nominal agreement; Portuguese from the inland cities of Bahia; Sociolinguistics; Language contact.

PAGES: 212
BIG AREA: Lingüística, Letras e Artes
AREA: Lingüística
SUBÁREA: Sociolingüística e Dialetologia
SUMMARY:

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.

BANKING MEMBERS:
Interno - 2294774 - JOAO PAULO LAZZARINI CYRINO
Interna - 1544686 - LILIAN TEIXEIRA DE SOUSA
Interna - 2331858 - MARIA CRISTINA VIEIRA DE FIGUEIREDO SILVA
Externa à Instituição - LÍVIA OUSHIRO - UNICAMP
Externo à Instituição - ALEXANDER COBINNAH - USP
Externa à Instituição - LANUZA LIMA SANTOS - IFBA