A sociolinguistic approach to noun agreement in number in the oral speech of inhabitants of the municipality of Fonte Boa (state of Amazonas)

Abstract

The present article, based on Variationist Sociolinguistics, aims to investigate number variation in noun agreement in the speech of ten inhabitants of the city of Fonte Boa, one of nine municipalities that integrate the Alto Solimões micro-region (in the state of Amazonas), based on Martins (2013). In this study, 1,356 pieces of data were described, analyzed, and submitted to the Goldvarb 2001 statistical program. 754 pieces (55% of the data) consisted of the variable “presence of plural markers”, while 602 (45% of the data) were in the variable “absence of plural markers”. In spite of the low rate of noun agreement, results show that the plural marking in the agreement is favored in Fonte Boa by the same linguistic restrictions found in other Brazilian regions. Regarding social variables, ‘level of education’ reflects standard behavior and ‘gender’ reveals that men favor marking - in which the roles of women and men are still conservative, and women are less sensitive to the 'job market' variable.

Keywords

• sociolinguística
• concordância nominal de número
• fonte boa (am)
• particularidades e generalizações