A variação dos pronomes possessivos de segunda pessoa teu/seu e de suas flexões na produção textual de estudantes dos anos finais do ensino fundamental de duas escolas públicas de Porto Alegre/RS

Abstract

This study investigates the variation of the second-person possessive pronouns “teu” and “seu” and their inflections in essays written by students from two public schools in Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, in light of the Variation Theory (Labov, 2008 [1972]; Weinreich; Labov; Herzog, 2006 [1968]). Its main objective is to identify the linguistic and extralinguistic factors that influence the variable use of the pronoun “teu” and its inflections. The corpus under investigation consists of 2,174 occurrences of “teu/seu” and its inflections extracted from 550 essays written by 190 students enrolled in the final years of Elementary School (from the 6th to the 9th grade). The linguistic variables considered include: formal parallelism, animacy, generality of the referent, pronoun alternation “tu/você”, and alternation of possessives “teu/seu” in the written texts. The extralinguistic variables include: gender, grade level in Elementary School II, school, distortion, instrument, age, and informant. After stratification, the occurrences were analyzed using the R software through the RStudio interface. The results indicate a low occurrence of the possessive “teu” and its inflections, with a rate of 6.5% (141 occurrences), and a preference for the use of “seu” and its inflections, with a rate of 93.5% (2,033). Logistic regression revealed that the statistically significant variables for the use of “teu” and its inflections include formal parallelism, alternation of personal pronouns in the texts, collection instrument, and age. The results obtained reveal the conditioning role of parallel pronouns when in the same sentence. Occurrences of only the personal pronoun “tu” or the alternation between “tu” and “você” also favor the probability of the occurrence of “teu” and its inflections compared to the isolated use of “você”. Furthermore, a positive correlation was observed between the participant’s age and the occurrence of “teu” and its inflections. Regarding the instruments, the proposed letters to a friend and letters to an idol are favorable, indicating that participants associated the notion of proximity with the “teu” variant and its inflections.