A sociolinguistic study of discourse marker Assim in Brazilian Portuguese
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Date
2022-09-02
Authors
Escudero, Gabriel
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Abstract
This thesis aims to understand the linguistic and social factors that impact the use of Brazilian
Portuguese discourse marker assim 'like that' in Natal, an economically neglected city with a low
prestige dialect, and Rio de Janeiro, the second-most populous Brazilian city with a prosperous
economy and a dialect associated with high status and power. A total of 930 tokens of discursive
uses of assim, a stigmatized feature in Brazilian Portuguese, were collected from 105 individual
interviews conducted in 1993 for the Discurso & Gramática corpus (Votre & Oliveira, n.d.;
Cunha, 1998) and were analyzed based on linguistic (clause placement, syntactic categories
adjoined, conversation topic) and social factors (age, sex, location). Overall, the most common
placement of assim is clause-medial, and χ2 statistical analysis shows that males prefer placing
assim after nouns, while females prefer using it after verbs. The placement of assim between a
determiner and a noun and between the subject and the verb are unusual, confirming previous
conclusions (Silva & Macedo, 1992). Moreover, assim never appears before an auxiliary verb,
even though this syntactic constraint was not mentioned in previous literature. Mixed-effects
statistical analysis shows that speakers from Rio de Janeiro use assim more frequently at the end
of the clause, with this use being led by 18-20-year-old males, and that females from both
locations prefer to use assim with topics that prompt them to express opinions. This thesis
contributes to the existing literature on discourse markers, offering a glimpse into the connection
between prestige and language variation in Brazilian Portuguese.
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Keywords
discourse markers, Brazilian Portuguese