VARIAÇÃO DA EXPRESSÃO DO OBJETO DIRETO ANAFÓRICO: UMA ANÁLISE DA FALA RURAL DE SANTA LEOPOLDINA - ES

Abstract

The objective of this thesis is to describe the variation phenomenon of the the anaphoric direct object expression in the countryside of Santa Leopoldina/ES, as well to describe the contrast between the countryside speech and the urban speech based on the rural-urban continuum suggested by Bortoni-Ricardo (2005). For this purpose, 44 interviews were analyzed and stratified according to gender/sex, age, and level of education of the speakers. The data collected was compared to the data collected in the city of Vitória, the capital of Espírito Santo (LAUAR, 2015). This research also aims to discuss the role played by formal education in the process of acquisition of the standard variation and the use of the full pronoun variant. To do such, we based our research on William Labov’s (2008) Language Variation and Change Theory, and employed the software Goldvarb X (SANKOFF; TAGLIAMONTE; SMITH, 2005) for data analysis. The conclusion of this thesis shows that the rural dialect shared similarities with the dialect spoken in other Brazilian cities, such as Rio de Janeiro OMENA, 1978), São Paulo (DUARTE, 1986) and Vitória (LAUAR, 2015) when it comes to the substitution of the accusative clitic in the third person by three distinct forms: full pronoun, anaphoric syntagm noun and zero anaphora. The results have shown that the linguistic variation analyzed in the speakers had already been completed. In Santa Leopoldina, the accusative clitic does not seem to exist in the speech produced by the citizens, thus demonstrating such characteristic does not belong to the community’s vernacular, let alone Brazil’s, but a product of the process of education. In the urban dialect, this seems to be connected to the use of the standard variation, being directly proportional to the level of the speaker’s education, whereas the rural data indicate that level of education has nothing to do with the presence of the aforementioned variation. The zero anaphora seems to be the most produced occurrence with 60% of speakers (in Vitória, 54,8%) and presents itself with a well-established language embedding. The index of full pronoun usage with a strong language embedding seems to be quite present in both communities: 12,7% in the rural area and 13,7% in urban area. A similar occurrence can be observed, too, regarding the anaphoric syntagm noun variant: 30,9% in Vitória and 26,7% in Santa Leopoldina. These indexes show the similarities between both communities. The language embedding that conditions the choice of the variants points to the systematization of the variation of the anaphoric direct object.