A morfossintaxe na oralidade do vêneto sul-rio-grandense : perfil dialetal de comunidades rurais da região da 4ª légua, Caxias do Sul/ RS

Abstract

Morphosyntax of the Venetian dialect of the Italian Colonization Region of Rio Grande do Sul (ICR) still presents aspects which require study such as the use of auxiliary verbs, some inflections, word formation, and different other peculiarities which are not yet enough described. Starting from the situation observed, the objective of this study is to examine, from the point of view of functional linguistics, to which extent morphosyntactic structures in the oral Venetian dialect of the Southern region of Rio Grande do Sul, when compared to those of the Venetian dialect and Portuguese, unveil similarities and differences in the verb formation of the Portuguese Preterite, and in lexical aspects such as vocabulary renewal. The method used is data collection, carried out in a field survey in a few rural communities in Caxias do Sul. The research questions are divided in two steps: ask the interviewee to translate a sentence from Portuguese into the Venetian dialect, and ask the interviewee to narrate facts, also in the dialect. The survey corpus consists of the interviews and the above mentioned questions with eight informers (four men and four women), four of them aged over 60 years (two men and two women), and four, equally divided by genre, aged between 40 and 59 years. This delimitation was established so that it would enable to see whether older speakers still preserve more original features of this dialect, as the verbal construction with the Preterite, if compared to younger ones, who may adopt different uses. Besides, lexical choices made by the speakers were emphasized in an attempt to observe whether there is a significant presence of neologisms due to contact with other languages, once more taking into consideration the age difference. The corpus analysis showed that talian has been undergoing changes in consequence of its continuous contact with Portuguese, particularly in neology, with the presence of loan words. Code-switching was also observed in both age groups, much more with women. Concerning the verbal construction with the Preterite, the auxiliary verb choice escapes the rule in some cases, but it is not a significant aspect. There are uses of the auxiliary verb aver found in a few speakers only. Informants in general present remainder characteristics of the Eastern Trentino dialect in their speech.