The potiguar speech in talk show: the alternation of personal pronouns NÓS and A GENTE
Pronoun variation; NÓS; A GENTE; talk show.
Guided by theoretical and methodological foundations of variationist sociolinguistics, this dissertation aims to describe and analyze the alternation between subject plural first-person pronouns NÓS and A GENTE in the speech of interviewees and the interviewer of the talk show Agora é com Danilo. The corpus contains 407 data of NÓS and A GENTE in the subject function from 19 interviews done with the guests of the television talk show and 228 data of these pronouns in the interviewer's speech. We codify the data from the interviewees according to linguistic (referent determination, parallelism, and subject filling) and social (sex, age, and occupation) factors. We did the same with the interviewer’s data for the linguistic factors. However, for social factors, we codified the data according to the social profile of the interviewees, from the perspective of accommodation to the interlocutor. Then we submit the codification to the statistical program GOLDVARB X to obtain frequencies and relative weights. All linguistic factors were statistically significant for respondents, and, regarding social factors, occupation and sex were significant. NÓS and A GENTE distribution patterns for these factors were similar to patterns observed in investigations carried out in different Brazilian regions. The significant factors for the talk show host were parallelism and subject filling. There was no evidence of accommodation to the interlocutor. The informal tone of the program could have been the reason for the greater use of A GENTE in the host’s speech, regardless of the interviewee’s social profile.