A variação pronominal NÓS e A GENTE na escrita escolar de alunos do ensino médio

Abstract

The present study, based on the theoretical and methodological framework used by the Theory of Linguistic Variation and Change, developed by Weinreich, Labov and Herzog (1968) and by Labov (1997, 2001, 2003), aims to analyze the first-person pronominal variation of the plural, nós and a gente, in school writing from the three years of high school in a public school in Fortaleza-CE. For that, we used a sample composed of 360 texts, 120 of which were written by 1st year students, 120 by 2nd year students and another 120 by 3rd year students. The informants were stratified according to sex/gender, age group and study series. With the help of the computer program GoldVarb X, we analyzed 1265 occurrences of nós and a gente in the school compositions. With this total, we found that the variant nós is used more frequently than the innovative form a gente (89.4% and 10.6%, respectively). Furthermore, we found that the most relevant factors that condition the use of the standard variant in our sample were: the degree of referentiality of the pronoun (specific sense), discursive parallelism (pronoun preceded by nós) and subject completion (null subject).