REMODELING OF THE ANIMACITY, DEGREE AND LEXICAL FORMALITY OF NOUNS: THE NOMINAL AGREEMENT PROCESS – SANTA LEOPOLDINA/ES

Abstract

This article is the product of the thesis of Lopes (2014), which analyzes the phenomenon of nominal number agreement, in spoken Portuguese, in the rural area of ​​the municipality of Santa Leopoldina, in the mountain region of the state of Espírito Santo. In the sample, 6313 data were made, upon an atomistic analysis of the nominal syntagma – that is, each element of the nominal syntagma is considered susceptible to analysis. The survey culminated in an overall rate of 61.3% nominal agreement. This text aims to present, specifically, the effect of the variable animacity, degree and lexical formality of the nouns in the community under analysis. A pioneering study on nominal agreement, Scherre (1988) analyzes the variables “animacity of nouns” and “degree and lexical formality of nouns and adjectives” as two different groups of factors. In Santa Leopoldina, these variables had to be remodeled, starting from their amalgamation, since the analysis of these separately did not produce statistical convergence, a factor that points to the existence of orthogonality between these, as attested by Guy and Zilles (2007). Therefore, we will discuss the results of the variables analyzed separately and amalgamated. Our goal is to reflect on the motivations of the Leopoldinian results. In this regard, Lopes (2014, p. 177) notes that [- human] and [+ animated] items, regardless of degree and formality, disfavor the presence of brands in this community. Therefore, our hypothesis is that the fact that these elements are integrated into the rural daily life in Santa Leopoldina favors the intimacy, speaker and the element to be inflected, which disfavors the nominal agreement.