“Carlinda me falou que tu não falou a sua mãe a respeito disto”: a variação teu/seu no paradigma de segunda pessoa do singular em cartas de amor interioranas do século XX

Abstract

The present study aims to analyze the variation of second-person possessive in Brazilian Portuguese teu/tua/seu/sua and to investigate whether the agreement with the personal pronouns tu and você in the position of subject is established. Our corpus consisted of 153 personal letters from the 20th century, in the subgenre love letter, which are part of the computerized text bank of the Pernambuco Linguistic Documentation Laboratory (LEDOC). Data analysis focused on both linguistic and socio-pragmatic aspects of that variation, based on the theoretical assumptions of Historical Sociolinguistics (CONDE SILVESTRE, 2007) and Variationist Sociolinguistics (LABOV, 1972). The discussion of our findings also relied on assumptions of Discursive Tradition (KABATEK, 2006) as well as of theories that deal with the study of the relationships established in the interaction between the correspondents, such as, for example, the theory of Power and solidarity (BROWN AND GILMAN, 1960) and Theory of Politeness (Brown and Levinson, 1987). In the analysis, only the extralinguistic variable gender was controlled. Regarding the linguistic variables, the following categories were selected: the position of subject, the classification of letters, filled and unfilled subject, the semantics of the possessed element, the position of the possessive in relation to the noun and the compositional structure of the letter. As a result, in the 153 letters from Pernambuco, we identified 319 occurrences of the analyzed phenomenon, which are distributed in 202 occurrences of seu and 117 of teu. It was also verified that there is agreement between the forms tu-teu, você-seu and that, from the 90s, the forms você-seu are almost unanimous in the corpus. From the control of the filled and unfilled category of subject we identified that already in the 90's, the teu still shows resistance when você are in the unfilled category of subject. We also observed that women tend to preserve the canonical forms tu-teu. Regarding the compositional structure of the letter, we identified that the possessive of seu next to the Farewell Section and the P.S. formed a Discursive Tradition. With regard to the control of the semantics of the term owned, this variable was not relevant in the variation of the possessives. Finally, the control of the variable position of the possessive in relation to the term possessed showed that, in Brazilian Portuguese, the possessives of the second person occupy the pre-nominal position.