Linguistic beliefs and attitudes of the use

Abstract

Given that the way in which linguistic forms are evaluated - positive or negatively - can speed or stop a change in the language, we focus, in this work, in in the evaluation problem (LABOV, 1972), with the intention of measuring the subjective norms of the maceioenses speakers in relation to the pronominal alternation nós and a gente and the verbal agreement related to these pronominal forms. For this propose, we resort the theoretical and methodological assumptions of Theory of Language Variation and Change and we used a sample constituted of 52 interviews of maceioenses speakers. According to the data analyzed, we verified that, in relation to the pronominal alternation, the linguistic beliefs and attitudes  of the speakers do not correspond to the linguistic behavior of the community, suggesting that such alternation is a linguistic phenomena of the marker type, and, as far as to verbal agreement, we find that the linguistic beliefs and attitudes of the speakers move in the same direction as the linguistic behavior of the community, suggesting that both agreement with nós and agreement with a gente are phenomena of the stereotype type, with a greater acceptance of the use of the variant nós + 3PS.

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DOI: http:/dx.doi.org/10.12957/matraga.2017.26878