Variation and specialization of use in the concessive functional domain in the speech of Natal (RN) - a socio-functionalist approach
concessive conjunctions; variationist sociolinguistics; functionalism; sociofunctionalism; sociolinguistic interviews.
The concessiveness is postulated as an argumentative and rhetorical movement (NEVES, 1999, 2000; NEVES, BRAGA, 2016) by which the voice of the interlocutor emerges in the discourse, and is also described, by grammarians (CUNHA, CINTRA, 2013, BECHARA, 1954, 2009) as an indication that a real or imaginary obstacle, presented in the concessive clause, was not strong enough to prevent the event presented in the main clause to occur. On this research, we have as object of study concessive conjunctions extracted from sociolinguistic interviews of the Banco de Dados FALA-Natal. The FALA-Natal was constituted with members from the Natal speech community, stratified in sex, age and level of education. The main objective is to describe and analyze the concessive conjunctions context of occurrence based on syntactic, semantic-pragmatic, stylistic, discursive and social factors, and also to trace generalizations about possible specializations of use of these forms. On the theoretical basis, it is found the articulation of theoretical-methodological assumptions of the variational sociolinguistics, guiding the look at the phenomenon of variation and linguistic change in the use of concessive conjunctions, and the vision of the North American functionalism of grammar as an emergent entity, fluid and shaped by the use that is given in the day to day by the speakers to the linguistic items. Upon to this perspective, we developed a qualitative-quantitative research. The data quantification is done not only for the testing of the hypotheses, but also to allow both generalizations about the studied phenomenon and the results comparison of this research with other researches dealing with the same theme, and also in the search for indications of specialization in the use of concessive conjunctions. Our research involves the investigation of syntactic factors (mode-temporal correlation, sentence ordering, type of construct to which the conjunction is linked), semantic-pragmatics (semantic relations, domains of reading, identity between participants in the main clause and in the concessive clause), discursive (gender and subject) and social (sex, age and level of schooling).