The Expression ‘Daí’ in Curitiba Informants Speech: a study based on the Brazilian Linguistic Atlas data

Abstract

This paper aims to identify the circumstances of use of the item daí (then) in the speech of informants from Curitiba and has as corpus data from interviews of the Projeto Atlas Linguístico do Brasil (ALiB) (Brazilian Linguistic Atlas Project) conducted in this city. This research is justified by the fact that in southern Brazilian localities the use of daí is frequent in contexts different from those established by grammars, that is to say, as an adverb of place or time. For the constitution of the theoretical foundation, we used studies on grammaticalization process and stratified the results based on the Linguistic Variation Theory, in which we observed the data according to the diasexual, diageneric and diastratic variables. Therefore, this research intents to: (i) verify, in the speech of Curitiba informants from ALiB corpus, the use of the expression daí as an adverb and as other grammatical or discursive classes; (ii) analyze each employment according to extralinguistic variables; and (iii) verify if there are linguistic factors intervening in the use of the expression daí. Thus, we found that daí proved to be a discursive mark in the speech of older women with higher education, which may indicate that the change did not consolidate, but the frequency of its usage remains at the level of diageneric and diastratic variation.

Keywords

• useage of daí
• brazilian linguistic atlas
• curitiba