VARIAÇÃO NOS PRONOMES POSSESSIVOS DE 1A PESSOA DO PLURAL

Abstract

In Brazilian Portuguese there are two ways to represent the possessive reference in the first person plural, nosso(a)(s) and da gente. We aim to analyze the variation of these possessive forms in the speech of university students from Campus Itabaiana/UFS. We used the sample Displacements 2018/UFS-Itabaiana, composed of 80 sociolinguistic interviews, stratified according to the sex/gender of the informants, and collected based on the theoretical-methodological support of the Variationist Sociolinguistic. (LABOV, 2008). The results show that the canonical variant nosso (a)(s) is more used by university students, with 93% of occurrences (n = 443), while the analytical variant da gente obtained the percentage of 7% (n = 34). The results of the chi-squared test show that there is a statistically significant association between the variables formal parallelism, size of the possessing group, inclusion of the interlocutor, position of the possessive, presence of determinant, type of determinant, type of phrase and sex/gender of the speaker and the use of nosso or da gente to express possession, favoring our pronoun in all controlled contexts. Although the number of occurrences of da gente was very low in the speech of university students, the results give evidence that the position of the possessive and the definiteness of the noun phrase work as linguistic barriers for the embedding of da gente into the Brazilian Portuguese possession system, given that the innovative pronoun occurs only after the noun and tries to be used more with the presence of a determinant in the NP.