Patterns of third person plural verbal agreement

Abstract

This paper aims to provide a Labovian sociolinguistic description of 3 rd person plural patterns of agreement in European (EP), Brazilian (BP) and São Tomé (STP) Portuguese based on very recent samples of speech stratified for age, sex/gender and education. Linguistic and social restrictions for the variation are investigated. Results from statistical analysis indicate that there are two patterns of agreement in Portuguese: a semi-categorical rule, typical of EP, and a variable rule, typical of BP and STP, restricted by specific linguistic and social factors. Additionally, the results indicate that general linguistic constraints-such as the position of the subject, semantic feature of the subject or even discursive parallelism-cannot say anything about historical origin of Portuguese varieties, since they can be concerned with any language. Therefore, besides the quantitative expression of non-agreement, the quality of the occurrences of non-plural marking may support the characterization of each variety.