Pronominal subject in the comics

Abstract

The present research was developd based on the theoretical

and methodological presumptions of the Variationist

Sociolinguistics (LABOV, 1972) and focused on the pronominal

variation in the Brazilian Portuguese, delimiting as the object

of analysis the 1st (eu, nós, a gente) and 2nd person pronouns

(tu, você, vocês). The corpus analysed is part of the Duck Donald

comics and was compounded of the editions of 1950 a 1952,

1963, 1973, 1983, 1993 e 2003/2004, adding, at the end of

the process, 19.980 occurrences whith were submited to the

VARBRUL computacional program, for the qualitative and the

quantitative analyses of data. The study had as main objective

the investigation of the variational process represented by the

alternation of the fulfillment/no fulfillment of the pronouns de

1st e 2nd person pronouns in the subject position, verifying the

possible linguistic conditioning of the phenomenon on written

language represented in comics. Besides the variation analyses,

we also studied the behavior the pronouns nós and a gente

separately to draw the trajectory of both in that period of time.

We worked with three linguistic variables: the grammatical

personal, time and verbal form and types of sentences and

three social: sex, classification age and year of publication.