Variation and change in the form of the existential verb in the speech of the literate elite of the city of Rio de Janeiro: a current view
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.22409/b8cmn747Keywords:
existential verb, language change, Brazilian Portuguese, literate norm, prescriptive grammarAbstract
The article presents the results of a variationist analysis of the verb form in existential clauses, based on a sample of informal speech composed of twelve sociolinguistic interviews conducted in 2023 with residents of the city of Rio de Janeiro who have at least completed higher education, distributed across three age groups and both sexes. Comparing the overall frequency of variants with similar analyses conducted on samples from the NURC Project in Rio de Janeiro, from the 1970s and 1990s, revealed a consistent process of change over a fifty-year period, culminating in the use of the verb ter in an existential sense at an almost semi-categorical level. This process of change is being led by women, as a result of the position they have been assuming in society in this century, and is conditioned, in the linguistic structure, by the semantic characterization and level of referentiality of the argument of the existential clause, as well as by verb tense.
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