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Studies on Variation in Portuguese
Edited by Pilar P. Barbosa, Maria da Conceição de Paiva and Celeste Rodrigues
[Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 14] 2017
► pp. 135–152

Chapter 5
“Vocês tenham cuidado, sois educadas para isso”

Second person pronouns in Braga speech

| University of Minho, Portugal
| Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

The replacement of the pronoun vós ‘you’ by vocês ‘you’ is a widely spread change in spoken Portuguese. Nonetheless, the pronoun vós can be attested in certain varieties of European Portuguese, as in Braga, a city in the Northwest of Portugal. This paper focuses on variation between these two forms of address in subject function (overt or null subject) and in complement function. Our goal is to verify the social and linguistic factors associated to the overt pronoun vós. The analysis of a socially stratified sample of sociolinguistic interviews shows that the overt pronoun vós is rarely used in the region and that the use of 2nd person plural null subjects as address forms is decreasing, in contrast to an increasing use of vocês and 3rd person plural forms.

Keywords: variation, change, forms of address, second person plural
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Some theoretical and methodological issues
  • 3. Variation between vós and vocês in Braga’s speech
  • 4.Variation between ø2pl and ø3pl in subject function
  • 5.Variation in complement function
  • 6.Final remarks
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 2 November 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ihll.14.05agu
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