A concordância verbal com a primeira pessoa do plural em Panambi e Porto Alegre, RS

Abstract

This is part of a project about several related morphosyntactic changes in Brazilian Portuguese using data from VARSUL data base. Two cities in RS are considered: Porto Alegre, the capital, and Panambi, a bilingual community. The sample included 32 interviews stratified according to sex, age, and level of formal education. The variable investigated is verbal marking with first person plural subjects. The variants are: standard agreement (-mos ending) and two nonstandard forms: zero and /s/ deleted -mo inflections. Supposing two different variable rules, we made three separate Varbrul analyses: a)contrasting the three variants; b) contrasting zero inflection with both -mos and -mo endings taken together; and c)contrasting only -mos and -mo endings. The distribution of the variants was: 53% of standard tokens, 34% of -mo endings and only 13% of zero inflection. Results showed different factor groups associated with zero inflection and nonstandard -mo inflection, supporting the idea of having two separate variable rules. The level of formal education turned out to be the only significant factor group in common for both nonstandard forms. It was also highlighted in the three-way comparison. Zero inflection was favoured only when the target word had antepenultimate stress, suggesting avoidance of this stress pattern. The bilingual community had an effect only on zero inflection.