The verbal agreement of 3rd person plural in Pelotas/RS

the article analyzes the variation in verbal agreement of 3rd person plural based on interviews of 90 informants who make up the VarX – Sociolinguistics Database Variable by Social Class of Pelotas/RS –, stratified according to gender, social class, age: 45 are males and 45 females; 30 of the upper middle class, 30 of the low middle class, and 30 of the low social class; 30 are between 16 and 25 years of age, 30 between 26 and 49 and 30 of the age group over 50 years.We used quantitative methodology based on the Windows interface for Varbrul and on data encryption form. The results show that, in Pelotas, there is variation in verbal agreement of 3rd person plural, but with predominance of the use of the mark, since the presence of verbal endings occurs in 4317 contexts (of a total of 5263), consisting of 82%, and in 945 contexts there are no agreement marks, totaling 18%. We also found, based of the social variables, that there is evidence of acquisition of 3rd person plural agreement, since there is a gradual increase in use of verb agreement marks, whose direction goes from the older to the younger informants, given that the younger have higher rates and relative employment of verbal endings of 3rd person plural.   KEYWORDS: Verb agreement. Pelotas. Linguistic Variation.

Relativity in legal writing

In this article, we discuss the linguistic variation in the coding of relativity in the Portuguese language. The theory of Variation and Change (Labov, 1972) provided the basis for this study. We analyzed 40 texts of legal writing, which contained between 5 and 15 pages, selected by the following criteria: type of activity, age and gender of the lawyers. We obtained 64 pieces of information, of which 34.4% refers to the occurrence of non-standard relative clauses and 65.6% to the forms prescribed by the normative grammar. As aspects of linguistic basis, we controlled the syntactic function of the relative clause, its position in the sentence as well as the presence or absence of intervening material in the sentence. We noted that although the forms considered standard still remain in monitored writing, it is now possible to notice a significant frequency of forms that go against grammatical textbooks, what can point to a linguistic change in progress.