The influence of semantic factors in the use of general nouns for the subject indeterminacy

Abstract

Subject indeterminacy in Brazilian Portuguese has been researched by several authors, such as Milanez (1982), Menon (1994), Carvalho (2010) and others. Most of the studies aim to verify which factors can condition the use of each strategy of indeterminacy. From a variationist perspective, this article aims to discuss the relevance of semantic factors in the use of general nouns to achieve the subject indeterminacy. As general nouns, we consider certain units, between the lexicon and the grammar, with minimal semantic features (Halliday & Hasan, 1976). The corpus of the research is composed of sociolinguistic recordings collected in Bambuí, a city of the state of Minas Gerais. The analysis shows that, in terms of frequency, the general nouns (pessoa ‘person’, pessoal ‘people’, pessoas ‘people’, cara ‘guy’, homem ‘man’, povo ‘people’, fulano ‘so-and-so’ and ser humano ‘human being’), occupy the third position in the set of the variants. The other variants refer to those that have already been discussed in previous research such as a gente ‘we’, você/ocê/cê ‘you’, nós/nóis ‘we’, eles/ês ‘they’ and others. Regarding the statistical results of the correlation between the variables, it is observed that the subject indeterminacy with general nouns is conditioned by the absence of anaphora and by the total indeterminacy of the referent or partial indeterminacy when the referent is implicit.