Social meanings of seu/teu variation

investigating possessives forms in Fábio Porchat’s speech

Abstract

In this article, we intend to analyze the social meanings potentially linked to the variable use of possessive pronouns with reference to the second person singular (2SG), with special attention to the variant ‘teu’ (and inflections). The starting point of our discussion is the monographic study by Tosi (2021), who investigated this phenomenon by adopting a macro sociological view. Now, we intend to explore a new perspective for the phenomenon in question, moving towards a more stylistic understanding of the treatment of variation, in terms of what Eckert (2012) calls third-wave sociolinguistic studies. Thus, we aim to analyze the question of the social meanings of the variants, returning to an old question in the area (LABOV, 1963). In this analysis, the following questions will be investigated: (i) what social meanings does the use of the variant ‘teu’ indicates in the analyzed artist’s speech? and (ii) is there a relationship between the expressive use of this variant and the type of character played? As a hypothesis, we assume that the variant ‘teu’ indicates values related to informality, aggressivity and masculinity in the carioca variety. Preliminary results provide favorable evidence to the hypotheses under investigation: the use of ‘teu’ is higher in scenes that bring characters more representative of the masculinity pattern and the variant ‘teu’ is more productive in informal scenes.