Speakers are (not) aware of morphosyntactic variation

Abstract

This research aims to observe the sociolinguistic sensitivity of speakers to a variation at the morphosyntactic level of the definite article before prenominal possessives, in a sua casa and ᴓ sua casa, and before anthroponyms, in eu vi Pedro and eu vi ᴓ Pedro. Therefore, it is questioned whether speakers recognize differences in the variable uses of the definite article before possessives and anthroponyms. To answer this question, a sentence discrimination task was developed and applied to the target contexts, using variable stimuli regarding the presence/absence of a definite article. Data analysis show that speakers do not always recognize differences in these linguistic contexts, with variation interfering with the results: the response time is longer when sentences are variable and speakers tend to have a high frequency of error in those sentences. It is concluded that speakers are aware of the morphosyntactic variation in the variable use of the definite article before possessive and anthroponym, even though they are hesitant in the face of variable sentences.