‘Pronto, professora, demoremo, mas cheguemo’: um estudo sociolinguístico sobre a variação morfofonológica em verbos da 1ª e 2ª conjugações na fala de Tefé-Amazonas

Abstract

This research aims to map and quantitatively describe the use of the linguistic phenomenon of morphophonological variation in P4, which occurs in regular verbs of the 1st and 2nd conjugation, in the present and past perfect tenses, in canonical forms such as chegamos and nascemos and their non-canonical varieties cheguemo and nascimo. This is a synchronic study within the framework of the Theory of Linguistic Variation (see LABOV, 2008 [1972], 1982, 1994; WEINREICH, LABOV, HERZOG, 2006 [1968]. The sample consists of 12 typically Labovian interviews carried out between May 2nd and 22nd in the city of Tefé-Amazonas, from which the vernacular of the informants was extracted, i.e., we tried to ensure minimal speech monitoring during the one-to-one interviews. The interviews that make up our corpus include 6 men and 6 women, divided into three age groups (9 to 21 years old; 22 to 49 years old and 49 and over), with primary and secondary schooling. The linguistic factors worked on were "verb tense", "lexical item", "deletion or not of -s in the PNE", meaning personal number-ending, which is regarding to singular and plural forms, and "ways of filling in the subject". Data analysis was based on percentages and frequency, i.e., the data set was not submitted to a statistical program. The results indicate that the non-canonical forms (-emo) and (-imos) are frequently used by female informants, older informants, and those with less schooling. The analysis of linguistic factors shows that the non-canonical forms refer in their majority to the context of the past perfect in the indicative form both first and second conjugation verbs. The most common lexical items are the varieties of the verbs chegar, ficar, passar, casar, começar and pescar, from the first conjugation, while the second conjugation includes the varieties of the items nascer and viver. The deletion of -s in the SNP determines the use of non-canonical forms and the subject of narratives is most often filled with the pronoun nós.