VARIATION IN THE FORM OF RELATIVE CLAUSES IN THE CONTEXT OF BRAZIL'S SOCIOLINGUISTIC POLARIZATION

Abstract

Relative clauses with an antecedent introduced by an interrogative word (with the exception of where) or by a relative pronoun governed by a preposition are no longer part of Brazilians’ natural grammar from all social strata. It is plausible that this fact is a result of a morphological simplification process triggered by the massive contact between languages which marks the formation of Brazilian society. However, this kind of change tends to be concentrated only in the lower social classes, which is decisive for the current configuration of sociolinguistic polarization in Brazil. In view of this, the results of the sociolinguistic analyzes of the variation in the form of relative clauses in the collection of Projeto da Norma Urbana Culta - Rio de Janeiro (NURC-RJ) and also from a sample of vernacular speech of popular Portuguese from the interior of the State of Bahia are compared to empirically verify the algorithm's predictions of sociolinguistic polarization in Brazil. The results of the quantitative analyses, within the framework of Labovian Sociolinguistics, revealed that, regarding the variation in the form of relative clauses, the speech of the literate elite differ from popular language in all three parameters predicted by the polarization algorithm: the difference on the frequency of use of linguistic variants, the subjective evaluation of these variants and ongoing trends of change in each of the two social groups. Thus, it appears that even in those changes induced by the contact that spread throughout all strata of Brazilian society, the sociolinguistic polarization situation remains.