Variação discursiva e gramaticalização: extensores gerais na fala natalense

Abstract

General Extenders are discourse-pragmatic expressions, characteristics of speech, which exhibit a compositional structure in common. In Brazilian Portuguese, the features present as a core the pronouns tudo and tal or the noun coisa. Although there are several researchers that analyze this phenomenon in other languages (cf. CHESHIRE, 2007; TAGLIMONTE e DENIS, 2010; PICHLER, 2010; PICHLER e LEVEY, 2011; FERNÁNDEZ, 2015; SECOVA, 2017), until now, there are no papers intended to analyze the variation of the forms in Brazilian Portuguese, which we know of. In this dissertation, we have as object of study the usage of General Extenders in the speech community of Natal. Our corpus is composed by 48 sociolinguistic interviews constituents of Banco de Dados FALA-Natal (cf. TAVARES, 2016). The main objective of this research is to circumscribe the occurrence contexts of each feature, in addition to describe and analyze the factors involved in this variable phenomenon. With regard to the theoretical basis, we use the variacionist sociolinguistic – a theory that argues that variation, although inherent in the language, does not occur in a random way, so it can be systematized and analyzed quantitatively – added to grammaticalization, from the point of view of American functionalism – responsible for the studies of language change that aim to demonstrate how lexical items, in certain linguistic contexts, begin to perform grammatical functions. Thus, we follow the variation-grammaticalization interface, because the analysis of grammaticalization "allows the elaboration of more refined explanations for the synchronic patterns of distribution of discursive features whose historical origin resides in grammaticalization processes" (TAVARES, 2017, p. 188). Regarding the analysis, from quantitative nature, we consider the following independent variants: gender, age, function performed by the form and compositional extension of the form. In relation to the function, the results showed that tal was favored by the solidarity request, the more grammaticalized function, coisa and tudo were favored by the function of category marking, the less grammaticalized. These results point to the possibility of tal be the most grammaticalized form. The variable independent structure of form couldn’t be analyzed because the variant forms have, for the most part, only one or two compositional elements. With regard to gender, women favored coisa and tudo and men favored tal, which may have two explanations. It could be the advance of the grammaticalization of tal led by men or social spread of coisa and tudo led by women. As for age, the results obtained for coisa allow us to assume the possibility of change led by the pre-adolescents. In turn, tal may be undergoing change led by adolescents, with the manifestation of a peak of use, although the phenomenon of age grading can’t be excluded. Finally, tudo does not seem to be going through change. There is a polarity in its use: it is favored by the two older age groups and disadvantaged by the two younger age groups. Summarizing, our research describes the behavior of General Extenders in the speech community under analysis.