“CARLINDA TOLD ME THAT YOU DIDN’T TELL YOUR MOTHER ABOUT THIS”: THE TEU/SEU VARIATION IN THE SECOND PERSON SINGULAR PARADIGM IN TWENTIETH CENTURY INTERIOR LOVE LETTERS
Love letters. Possessive pronouns. Linguistic variation. Historical Linguistics. Brazilian portuguese.
The present study aims to analyze the variation of the second person possessive pronouns tu/tua/seu/sua and to investigate how agreement is established with the personal pronouns tu and você in the subject position. Our corpus consists of 153 personal letters written by couples from the 20th century, belonging to the computerized bank of texts of the Laboratory of Linguistic Documentation of Pernambuco (LEDOC). In analyzing the data, we considered both linguistic and socio-pragmatic aspects of this variation. To do so, we used the theoretical assumptions of Historical Sociolinguistics (CONDE SILVESTRE, 2007) and Variationist Sociolinguistics (LABOV, 1972). We also adopted the assumptions of the Discursive Tradition (KABATEK, 2006) and theories that deal with the study of the relationships established in the interaction between letter writers, such as the theory of Power and solidarity (BROWN; GILMAN, 1960) and the Theory of Politeness (BROWN ; LEVINSON, 1987) for the discussion of the data. In the data analysis, the only controlled extralinguistic variable was gender. Regarding linguistic variables, we selected as analysis category the subject position, the classification of the letters, the filled and unfilled category of subject, the semantics of the possessed term, the position of the possessive in relation to the noun and the compositional structure of the Letter. As a result, in the 153 Pernambuco letters, we identified 314 occurrences of the analyzed phenomenon, which are distributed in 203 occurrences of yours and 111 of yours. It was also verified that there is agreement between the forms você-seu, tu-teu and that, from the 1990s onwards, the forms você-seu are almost unanimous in the corpus. From the control of the completed and unfilled category of subject, we identified that, already in the 90s, your still presents resistance when you are in the unfilled category of subject. Regarding the compositional structure of the letter, we identified that the possessive its together with the farewell section and the P.S. form a Discursive Tradition. With regard to the semantic control of the possessed term, the number and gender of the possessive in these variables were not relevant in the variation of possessives. Finally, the control for the variable position of the possessive in relation to the term possessed showed that, in Brazilian Portuguese, second-person possessives occupy the pre-nominal position.