A alternância entre nós e a gente e a concordância verbal no cinema brasileiro: uma análise por géneros fílmicos

Abstract

Abstract – It is common knowledge and prescribed in all normative Portuguese grammars that the verb must agree in number and person with its subject, whether the latter is superposed or postponed to the verb. The lack of agreement between subject and verb ( concordância verbal variavel) is seen by users with a scholastic education as being wrong and linked to the poorest social strata, that is, with a low or zero level of education. However, cases of lack of agreement are not uncommon in informal speech of users with medium or high levels of education. This dichotomy between linguistic norms and orality, and its perception by the Brazilian population (i.e. lack of agreement as a sign of a lower educational and social level) can be verified also in the artistic reproduction, namely in the filmic dialogues of Brazilian national cinema, where verbal agreement variation is used to typify characters with little or no education. This paper will attempt to analyse how this linguistic phenomenon is interpreted by film discourse, i.e. a reproduction of orality. First, the linguistic issue will be presented, that is, the agreement and the lack of it in some registers of Brazilian Portuguese, and a brief presentation of the type of data on which this research was conducted (filmic dialogues from Brazilian films). Then, cases of variable verbal agreement (hereafter CVV) of the first plural person (hence 1PP) will be presented. In this perspective, the analysis of the alternation of use between two pronominal forms in subject function for the 1PP will be considered as a possible cause for the variation of verbal agreement between verb and subject with the 1PP. The approach adopted in this research brings together the variational studies and tools of Corpora Linguistics in an attempt to offer a critical view of the linguistic choices involved in film production.