Orações relativas cortadoras: entre a normatividade e a normalidade

Abstract

This work describes, in Brazilian Portuguese (BP), the cutter relative clauses, as they possibly appropriated the status of urban cultured norm alongside the relative standard. The object of study is certain prepositional relative clauses (relatives with indirect object, nominal complement and adverbial adjunct) because they carry out the “cut” of the preposition, thus producing the relative cutter. The other prepositioned relative clauses – prepositioned direct object and passive agent relative – are also evaluated, but briefly and secondarily, either because they are significantly less frequent (prepositioned direct object), or because they are not properly licensed with the universal relative that (passive agent). Relativization is cut from the generative perspective allied to variationist sociolinguistics (parametric sociolinguistics), based on Kato (2018), Roberts (2018), Tarallo (2018), among others. In this way, it appears that the study of relative clauses has always been limited to the general panorama of linguistic changes in BP since the 19th century, and embraces, in addition to the phenomenon of relativization itself, the already known alterations of the pronominal framework of this variety in this study. Thus, studies of relative clauses are accompanied by reflections on the problem of the null subject and object. The corpora consist of two genres, opportunely different: editorials from newspapers and magazines with national circulation and spoken discourse in an interview situation. The editorials are organized according to the criteria of regionalization and editorial orientation: 1) Folha de S.Paulo and O Globo and 2) Carta Capital and Época. The testimonies are from two Rio de Janeiro study groups, both from the modern language colledge at UFRJ: 1) Discourse & Grammar – the language spoken and written in the city of Rio de Janeiro and 2) Corporaport – varieties of Portuguese under analysis. The comparison between the relative clauses reveals numbers and indices that are not very unpredictable: the frequency rate of the standard relative clause is quite high in written media texts, while the percentage of frequency of the cutting the relative clause is much higher in the transcribed interviews. The numbers also demonstrate something relevant: the question is not the unconditional defense of the use of relative cutter, instead of the pattern strategy. On the contrary, what the studies suggest is a possible academic-pedagogical reconciliation in relativization, given the effective coexistence of the two strategies in different discurse environments in contemporary times