Nós and a gente: differences of use in varieties of portuguese
Abstract
The first person plural (1PP) in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) and in European Portuguese (EP) can be lexicalized as the pronoum ‘nós’ or as the pronoum ‘a gente’. This variation in the use has already been attested and described in several studies trying to find out the convergences and divegences of the varieties of the Portuguese language. We will present in this article part of research on the use of pronouns in BP and EP speech samples. In EP, the use of ‘nós’ happens in the subject function along with inflected verbs in the first person plural, fourth person of speech (P4), already in BP, the use of the same pronoun in the subject function can occur with third person singular, the third person of speech (P3) and it is commonly attested in oblique function (accusative and dative object), while in the EP the clitic pronoun ‘nos’ performs the accusative and dative functions. Regarding the use of ‘a gente’, the difference is that the agreement with P4 in the EP data is in the range of 24% and in the BP corresponds to only 4%. The verbal tense also showed up to be an important factor in the preservation of the P4 morphology in BP, confirming the hypothesis that the present and the perfect past of the indicative mode favors the presence of the P4 morpheme (MOS), becouse it has an inflectional paradigm that combines the notions of time, mode, aspect, person and number (Vieira, 2014).
Downloads
Metrics
DECLARATION OF ORIGINALITY AND COPYRIGHTS
I Declare that current article is original and has not been submitted for publication, in part or in whole, to any other national or international journal.
The copyrights belong exclusively to the authors. Published content is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) guidelines, which allows sharing (copy and distribution of the material in any medium or format) and adaptation (remix, transform, and build upon the material) for any purpose, even commercially, under the terms of attribution.
Read this link for further information on how to use CC BY 4.0 properly.