The use of gender-neuter marking in Brazilian Portuguese tweets: a sociolinguist approach

Abstract

This research investigates gender-neuter marking in Brazilian Portuguese, a recent lin guistic variation that has divided many opinions in Brazilian social and political circles until now. The Theory of Varia tion (LABOV, 2008 [1972]; WEINREICH; LABOV; HERZOG, 2006 [1968]), with a focus on Communities of Practice (ECKERT; MCCONNELL-GINET, 1992a, 1992b), supports the descriptio n and analysis conducted. To observe the variant, we opted for the social network Twitter, from which we collected 3,446 tweets produced by three subjects during the second half of 2020 who explic itly expressed a preference for the use of the neuter pronouns “Elu,” “Ilu,” “El” or “Ile.” As a selection criterion, we considered tweets containing adjectiv es, nouns, and pronouns whose referent was a human, and morphological markers carrying gender distinction. The predictor variables stipulated were morphosyntactic class, lexical ite m, the tweet topic, parti cipant, and the reference performed by gender marks (generic or specific). The sample was submitte d through the RStudio program, version 4.1.2, through which the proposed statisticaltreatment w as c arried o ut. T he r esults reveal a d isadvantage r egarding g ender-neuter marking for all partic ipants, not showing optimistic estimates about any specific word. They also pointed out the adjective class, the affective relationship and identity topics, and the generic reference performed by gender marking as conditioners of gender-neuter employment