Pronominal Alternation Between “nós” and “a gente”

Linguistic Evaluations of University Students from Alagoas

Abstract

This research has as object of study the linguistic evaluation of the pronominal alternation between “nós” and “a gente” (“we”) among university students from the Agreste region of Alagoas, Brazil. Linguistic production studies indicate that, in Alagoas, the innovative form “a gente” is preferred to occupy the first-person plural pronoun position (Oliveira; Nascimento, 2017; Vitório, 2016), despite prescriptive pressure — particularly from the school environment and more formal textual genres — in favor of the conservative form “nós”. Therefore, the objective of this research is to investigate the social meanings associated with the variants “nós” and “a gente”, since linguistic behavior may not align with speakers' evaluations (Freitag, 2016). To this end, the study employs a test developed using the matched-guise method and is based on Variationist Sociolinguistics (Campbell-Kibler, 2011; Lambert et al., 1960). To collect data, a questionnaire was administered via electronic form to 200 students from Campus III of the Universidade Estadual de Alagoas (UNEAL). The results indicate that even though the form “nós” received a more positive evaluation, the form “a gente” showed signs of increasing standardization in the studied community. The correlation between these pronouns cannot be reduced to a binary opposition between prestige and stigma, but understood within a system of normative values, in which both forms are socially evaluated in a predominantly positive manner but have distinct and independent social meanings, indexing a relationship of gradation between norms.