When a New Pronoun Crosses the Border
The Spread of A Gente on the Brazilian-Uruguayan Frontier
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 5900481 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Cíntia Da Silva Pacheco (0000-0002-6855-3432, Universidade de Brasília), Cíntia Pacheco, Ana Carvalho (0000-0002-8577-5352, University of Arizona, corresponding author), Marta Pereira Scherre (Universidade de Brasília) |
| Year | 2024 |
| Volume | 9 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 98 |
| Publication date | 2024-03-13 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Languages (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2226-471X • E-ISSN: 2226-471X |
| Publisher | MDPI AG (PUBLISHER • IT) |
| DOI | 10.3390/languages9030098 |
| OpenAlex | W4392745567 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 24 |
This study shows that the incorporation of the first-person plural pronoun a gente has not only reached the southernmost tip of the Brazilian territory, but has crossed the border and entered Uruguayan Portuguese, or varieties of Portuguese spoken in northern Uruguay by Portuguese-Spanish bilinguals. This finding is based on the quantification of the a gente/nós variable in sociolinguistic interviews carried out in two border communities: Aceguá, Brazil, and Aceguá, Uruguay. The analysis of interviews recorded on each side of the border yielded a total of 1000 tokens that were submitted to a multivariate analysis. Following the premises of comparative sociolinguistics, we compared the distribution of the variable on both sides of the border and found that although Uruguayans used a gente less often than Brazilians, this innovation, preferred by young speakers, is incorporated in both dialects, following similar linguistic paths. These results show that Uruguayan Portuguese has incorporated the pronominal a gente in its grammar in a clear sign of convergence towards Brazilian Portuguese and divergence from Spanish, despite the coexistence with Spanish that categorically uses nosotros as the first-person plural pronoun and reserves the cognate la gente for its purely lexical meaning 'the people
Archaeology · Frontier · Geography · Linguistics · Pronoun · History · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Multilingual Education and Policy · Philosophy · Spanish Linguistics and Language Studies
Analysing Sociolinguistic Variation
Language and Space
The permeability of tag questions in a language contact situation
The development of a new pronoun
Marking in discourse
I speak like the guys on TV
Change without change
Constraints on the agentless passive
Getting off the GoldVarb Standard
Alternância nós e a gente no português brasileiro e no português uruguaio da fronteira Brasil - Uruguai (Aceguá)
Identidade sociolinguística na fronteira de Aceguá (Brasil-Uruguai)
Paralelismo lingüístico
Nós e a gente em quatro amostras do Português Brasileiro
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |