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Confronting Grammatical Ideology with Usage: Toward a Socially Realistic Account of Spoken Portuguese

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Abstract

Adopting a variationist sociolinguistic perspective, this study addresses the uncritical equation of the prescriptive norms of standard Portuguese with those that underlie spontaneous spoken usage. Exemplifying with a study of the variable strategies for expressing locative relativization, quantitative analysis of spoken language data recorded in São Paulo state turns up a number of important findings. Chief among these is the rarity of the prescriptively ratified pied-piping strategy for forming locative relative clauses. Instead, two alternative options involving onde “where” and que + prepositional phrase-chopping make up the bulk of the variable context in everyday spoken interactions. Our results indicate that detailed analysis of spontaneous speech can considerably enrich our understanding of the variable grammatical processes that operate in actual discourse. We conclude that such findings are of primordial importance to educators, speech-language therapists, and allied professionals, who have a vested interest in access to scientifically grounded accounts of the spoken language.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The identification of the speaker was produced by Iboruna database (Gonçalves, 2007) representing the number of the speaker (AC0024; AC-050), the identification of textual type (DE—spatial description) and the line where the phrase occurs (L.243–244).

  2. 2.

    An analogous construction in other Romance languages (e.g., (Canadian) French) is alternatively referred to as “preposition absorption” (see, e.g., Poplack et al., 2012).

  3. 3.

    In English, where pied-piping competes with preposition stranding in oblique relative clauses, McDaniel et al. (1998:309) similarly argue that pied-piping is not a natural option, but is probably picked up during schooling.

  4. 4.

    The amalgamation of the original two age groups into a single broader one in this article is justified on the grounds of the paucity of data generated by the youngest (7–15) age group.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the São Paulo Research Foundation FAPESP (Grant 2020/00593-5 – Milena Aparecida de Almeida) and the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development CNPq (Grant 306464/2019-5—Rosane Andrade Berlinck).

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  1. Unesp - São Paulo State University, Araraquara, São Paulo, Brazil

    Milena Aparecida Almeida & Rosane Andrade Berlinck

  2. University of Ottawa (UOttawa), Ottawa, ON, Canada

    Stephen Levey

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  1. Milena Aparecida Almeida
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  1. Department of Linguistics, Literature and Classical Languages, São Paulo State University, Araraquara, São Paulo, Brazil

    Gladis Massini-Cagliari

  2. Department of Linguistics, Literature and Classical Languages, São Paulo State University, Araraquara, São Paulo, Brazil

    Rosane Andrade Berlinck

  3. Department of Linguistics, Literature and Classical Languages, São Paulo State University, Araraquara, São Paulo, Brazil

    Angelica Rodrigues

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Almeida, M.A., Berlinck, R.A., Levey, S. (2023). Confronting Grammatical Ideology with Usage: Toward a Socially Realistic Account of Spoken Portuguese. In: Massini-Cagliari, G., Berlinck, R.A., Rodrigues, A. (eds) Understanding Linguistic Prejudice. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25806-0_7

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