Possessivos teu/seu: variação e crenças/atitudes linguísticas

Abstract

This Master's thesis aims to analyze and describe the variation of the possessive pronouns referring to the second person singular, teu/seu, in the written language of last year's high school students from a public high school in Caxias, a city located in the state of Maranhao. It also aims to describe the linguistic beliefs and attitudes of these students, added to those of undergraduates in the Portuguese language, concerning this pronominal variation, to point out which variant has more linguistic prestige in formal and informal uses of language. For the description and analysis of the variation of teu/seu forms in the written language, the theory of variation and linguistic change by Weinreich, Labov, and Herzog (1968), Labov (1972), and the researches of Arduin (2005), Mendes (2008), Sbalqueiro (2005), Vargas (2014), among others, are taken as the theoretical basis. For the investigation of the linguistic beliefs and attitudes of students and undergraduates in the Portuguese language, the theoretical assumptions of Moreno Fernandez (1998), Labov (2008), and Cyranka (2007), among others, are considered. The corpus used in this case study consisted of 86 dialogues written by 52 high school students, which generated a sample of 131 occurrences of second-person singular possessive pronouns. The analysis of these occurrences considered linguistic and extralinguistic independent variables. The quantification of these data was based on the GoldVarb X statistical program (SANKOFF; TAGLIAMONTE; SMITH, 2005). The data on linguistic beliefs and attitudes were obtained utilizing a metalinguistic questionnaire answered by 80 informants socially stratified in gender (male and female) and education (last year of high school and last semester of a Portuguese language degree). In general, regarding pronominal variation, the results point to the predominance of the possessive seu in writing. Regarding the linguistic beliefs and attitudes of the informants, it was found that the variant seu is the prestigious one in formal contexts and that teu is the one that holds prestige in informal contexts. It was also found that the informants attribute the notion of "respect" to the variant seu and the notion of "intimacy" to the variant teu.