Variação entre né e não é, entende e entendeu na fala de idosos de distintos mundos socioculturais: um estudo comparativo em Livramento (MT) e Rio de Janeiro (RJ)

Abstract

In this research, we seek to analyze, under light of Variationist Sociolinguistics, the variation between “right this?”, “is not it?”, “You see?”, “Did you understand?” in the speech of elderly people from different socio-cultural worlds, considering linguistic and extralinguistic conditions based on the extracted data interviews conducted with elderly people from the age of 60 in the counties of Livramento (MT), students of Youth and Adult Education (EJA) and Rio de Janeiro (RJ). For this purpose, we tested five groups of linguistic factors (position in the clause, verb tense of the main verb, verbal mode of the main verb, semantic type of the main verb, textual sequence), and three extra-linguistic groups (sex/gender, education level, geographic region). Our corpus was collected from twenty-four interviews, twelve from Livramento and twelve from the counties of Rio de Janeiro. In the twenty-four interviews collected, we found 1684 data distributed in the use of discourse markers “right this?”, “is not it?”, “You see?”, “Did you understand?”, of which, 1.1% occurrences of “right this?”, 8.1% situations of “Did you understand?”, data that correspond to a percentage of 1.5% of “is not it?” and 89.3% occurrences referring to the marker "right this?". Our data were submitted to the Goldvarb statistical computer program, which generated the relative weights that served as a foundation for our description and data analysis. The program pointed out that extralinguistic factors stood out over linguistic ones. The relative weights showed that Elementary Education has a greater appropriation of the “right this?” and high school had more relevance with the marker "is not", demonstrating that its use occurs with speakers with a higher level of education. The “right this?” proved to be more innovative due to the discursivization process. The geographic region was the group that was most relevant, Rio de Janeiro was more conservative and Livramento was more innovative with regard to the oral modality of the language. Bearing in mind that the elderly in Livramento were more open to language changes and Rio de Janeiro was more conservative because the variations concerning the language remained more restricted. The marker "right this?" and “Is not it?" proved to be more innovative and “You see?” and “Did you understand?” more conservative. The relationship of the elderly with their social environment strongly traced the presence of external factors (sex, education, geographic region). The internal linguistic factors (grammatical elements) did not show considerable differences; the impress of subjectivity, that is, emotional issues prevailed in all informants' interviews, regardless of whether they were in the interior of Mato Grosso or in the capital of Rio de Janeiro, all the elderly sought to interact within their social and cultural space. The results showed that the elderly's narratives reveal old age as an involving stage of life and, at the same time, imperfect, like all the others. Our research allowed us to formulate the idea that thought, language and speech are associated, complemented and merged, in a complex and intense linguistic movement, as are our own human emotions