VERB AGREEMENT IN TEXTS WRITTEN BY STUDENTS FROM GARANHUNS-PE: A SOCIOLINGUISTIC ANALYSIS

A CONCORDÂNCIA VERBAL EM TEXTOS ESCRITOS POR ESTUDANTES DE GARANHUNS-PE: UMA ANÁLISE SOCIOLINGUÍSTICA

Abstract

The present article presents a study on the variation of verbal agreement in written texts of the Portuguese language in its actual use by students from the city of Garanhuns-PE in the rural region of Pernambuco. Starting from the assumption that verbal agreement in Brazilian Portuguese is a variable rule, the behavior of these informants in its variation was observed, in relation to the alternation of plural marks, and thus, the status of a variable agreement rule was verified in the variety under study, within the limits of a semi-categorical, following Labov (2003). There is a variant of prestige and a variant without prestige in competition with each other, we try not only to verify this variation but also to identify the linguistic and social factors that are influencing and conditioning this variation in formal writing. Among the linguistic factors, we selected and obtained the non-marking of verbal agreement between the types of action verbs 53.55% and state verbs 43.75% and position of the verb in relation to the subject 53.12%. The extralinguistic factors analyzed were: the gender and the level of education of the students. Our study is based on the theoretical and methodological perspective of Variationist Sociolinguistics (LABOV, 2008 [1972]), which considers language in its social context, also caused the use of research carried out previously on the studied phenomenon, but although some studies, such as those by Rodrigues (1997) and Vieira (1994), point out that schooling at the highest level is one of the factors responsible for increasing the chances of the standard variant being processed, in our investigation, this was not stimulated. Although we recognize that formal education has had an effect in terms of Portuguese language teaching, in the variation in focus, the level of education did not prove to be a defining factor or influencer for the use of the standard variant. The quantification of the data was done through tabulation and allowed us to arrive at the following results: there is no verbal agreement in the written language of the informants in general (14.15%) employed mainly among students with higher education in the 3rd year of high school , therefore, 6th and 9th grade classes of elementary school were also analyzed, as well as the male gender is the one that most presents the non-standard form. We verified the two linguistic factors that also act as conditioners of a variant. Therefore, it was seen that the school influences students to use the language in its standard norm, softening the use of variations considered non-standard.