Nós and a gente: differences of use in varieties of portuguese

  • Josany Maria de Jesus Silva Universidade Estadual do Sudoeste da Bahia
  • Cristiane Namiuti Universidade Estadual do Sudoeste da Bahia
Keywords: pronoun, portuguese language, grammar distinction.

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).

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Author Biographies

Josany Maria de Jesus Silva, Universidade Estadual do Sudoeste da Bahia
Mestre em Linguística pela Universidade Estadual do Sudoeste da Bahia – UESB.
Cristiane Namiuti, Universidade Estadual do Sudoeste da Bahia

Doutora em Linguística pela Universidade Estadual de Campinas – Unicamp. Professora do Departamento de Estudos Linguísticos e Literários e professora do quadro permanente do Programa de Pós-Graduação em Linguística da Universidade Estadual do Sudoeste da Bahia - UESB.

 

Published
2019-05-31
How to Cite
Silva, J. M. de J., & Namiuti, C. (2019). Nós and a gente: differences of use in varieties of portuguese. Acta Scientiarum. Language and Culture, 41(1), e43588. https://doi.org/10.4025/actascilangcult.v41i1.43588
Section
Linguistics

 

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0.1
2019CiteScore
 
 
45th percentile
Powered by  Scopus