Syntax Aspects of Popular Portuguese Spoken in Funchal

Abstract

Only very recently has research been developed on the syntactic variation in Spoken European Portuguese Varieties in Funchal (Madeira Island). This research is largely due to the Agreement Project (Projeto Concordância) which involves the participation of both Portuguese and Brazilian researchers. In this project, an Agreement Corpus, or Corpus Concordância, was established, with 27 sociolinguistically controlled interviews which are integrated in the, Sociolinguistic Corpus of Funchal (Corpus Sociolingístico do Funchal, or CSF). This article, based on the assumptions of Variationist Sociolinguistics, in particular the importance of social variables in linguistic variation, intends to contribute to the syntactic characterization of the Popular European Portuguese Spoken in Funchal (or PEP-Funchal). The results of several studies on variable syntactic phenomena – pronominal realization of the direct object function and the variable verbal third-person plural agreement, among others – demonstrate a marked preference for non-standard uses in Madeiran speakers with little schooling, who are more or less stigmatized in the community. This variety has its own structural characteristics, whose sociolinguistic nature carries identity features, configured in a Madeiran Popular Portuguese.

Keywords

Sociolinguistic Variation; Popular European Portuguese Spoken Variety of Funchal; Syntactic Variation; Madeira Island.