The use of the definite article in dialect contact: a study of the speech of Paraibanos in São Paulo

• Autor(a) principal: Guedes, Shirley
• Data de Publicação: 2019
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Domínios de Lingu@gem
• Texto Completo: https://seer.ufu.br/index.php/dominiosdelinguagem/article/view/46873
• topic: Artigo Definido; Acomodação Dialetal; Migração; Sociolinguística; Redes sociais; Definite Articles; Dialectal Accommodation; Migration; Sociolinguistics; Social Networks

This work is based on the theory and methods of Variationist Sociolinguistics (LABOV, 2008) and aims to analyze the linguistic behavior of speakers from João Pessoa-PB living in São Paulo-SP regarding the use of the definite article next to possessive pronouns (e.g., meu irmão vs. o meu irmão ‘my brother’). The results from the quantitative analyses showed that the migrants’ speech presented a proportion of use of the article closest to that of the Paulistano in relation to that of the non-migrant Paraibano, which indicates dialectal accommodation, and that those individuals also acquired more abstract patterns, in the form of variable rules of the host community (favoring and disfavoring of the definite article, in general, in the same linguistic contexts). The results also showed no correlation between the use of the article and the social predictors Sex/Gender, nor with the variables Age of migration and Time of permanence in São Paulo, but in an analysis of the individual and their social networks (MILROY, 1980) in the new community, we observe that strong ties from first-order contact are the basis of the dialectal accommodation and assimilation of the São Paulo linguistic variant by the migrants.