| dc.description.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. | |
