Sobre a origem do português popular brasileiro : uma análise de teses e dissertações

Abstract

This work based on the methodological theoretical assumptions of the Labovian sociolinguistics, arises from the need to understand the origin of Brazilian Popular Portuguese (PPB). The aim of this paper is to understand how theses and dissertations on verbal and nominal agreement address the processes responsible for the formation of Brazilian popular Portuguese. We have two theories on the subject. The first is the contact line, according to Lucchesi (2001, 2009, 2015), arguing that the origin of Brazilian popular Portuguese (PPB) is rooted in contact with the thousands of Africans who came to Brazil through a slave trade. Contact between different languages would have led to a process of creolizing nature. The second hypothesis goes against the contact line and is also defended by some linguists such as Naro and Sherre (2007a). The main idea of the derivative line is that the variations that occurred in archaic European Portuguese would also be repeated here, so that the PPB would be the result of a secular drift. One of the hallmarks evident in the variation in popular Portuguese is the low frequency of verbal and nominal agreement. This research has as methodology the analysis of theses and dissertations that were searched in the Catalog of Theses and Dissertations of the Coordination of Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES). The corpus selection was based on the search criterion for the keyword “agreement”. Papers were selected from the year 2014, the year when the works are available for download. For the analysis were considered papers that approach the PPB, papers that deal with the variation with the Brazilian Portuguese as a mother tongue and finally papers that analyze the speech. The corpus of this work consisted of three theses and three dissertations, totaling six works. The results point to the six papers defining PPB as being spoken by people who have little access to education, residents of isolated communities, outskirts who are at the bottom of the social pyramid. Five of the six papers point to an influence of the African languages on Brazilian Portuguese. Of the six papers, four bring the theme of desuloulization only in theoretical discussions and one brings evidence of the process, of the five papers a back evidence of the process.