ESPÍRITO SANTO IDENTITY IN SONGS BY LOCAL ARTISTS:

A SEMANTIC-LEXICAL, GRAMMATICAL AND DISCURSIVE VARIATIONIST SURVEY

Abstract

Considering the epistemology of variationist third-wave studies, the objective of this investigation is to carry out a semantic-lexical and grammatical survey, in songs by artists from Espírito Santo, of typical marks of a certain local linguistic-cultural identity, according to (certain) social imaginary and according to the results of Labovian variationist research, on 11 phenomena. The aim is also to analyze whether and how one (or more than one) Espírito Santo identity is constructed in the speeches evoked by the songs. Methodologically, the investigation is qualitative, interpretative, bibliographic and documentary, with an analysis of 10 artists from Espírito Santo and 12 songs, considered the most played in 2022, on the Spotify platform. After analysis, we identified that: (a) the majority of phenomena (eight) follow the same usage trends already identified in previous variationist research, in Espírito Santo lands, although these trends are not exclusive to this culture, but national usage trends, which makes it impossible to project a linguistic-cultural identity that is distinctly Espírito Santo; (b) some phenomena (three), however, do not follow the trends captured, including the phenomenon that, most significantly, has been identified as an Espírito Santo brand – absence or presence of an article in the face of anthroponyms and possessives. In general, there was no provision in the corpus for the projection/construction of  distinctly Espírito Santo identities.