Os marcadores discursivos sabe e entende? na fala de informantes do município de Chapecó

Abstract

This research aimed to analyse and describe the contexts of use of Discourse Markers (DMs) sabe? and entende? in the speech of monolingual Portuguese informants in Chapecó, Santa Catarina. The linguistic data come from VARSUL database (Variação Linguística na Região Sul do Brasil) and the Project “Variação e Mudança no Português do Oeste de Santa Catarina”. The sample consists in 36 interviews, stratified by age, sex and education. The work was based on the Sociofunctionalism interface, according to Naro (1998), Tavares (1999,2003, 2013), Görski et al. (2003), Görski and Tavares (in press, 2013), among others, which congregates the assumptions of the Theory of Linguistic Variation and Change and Linguistic Functionalism, especially by grammaticalization process, in accordance with Heine, Claudi and Hünnemeyer (1991), Traugott and Heine (1991), Hopper (1991), Traugott (1995, 2003), Heine (2003), Bybee (2003), and others. Without diachronic commitment, we focus on the trajectory of semantic and categorical change of saber and entender, from the condition of verbs to DMs, attempting to the studies available in Brazilian Portuguese of Martelotta and Leitão (1996), Valle (2001), Martelotta (2004) and Görski and Valle (2013).We postulate that DMs sabe? and entende? tend to fix their forms in the second person of the indicative present,but not morphologically marked as a person, in addition to acting in the discursive contact maintenance functional domain, from which coexist as layers, in terms of Hopper (1991), or as variants of the same variable, in terms of Labov (1978). Among other linguistic factors, we determined five prominent discursive contexts in the use: causal/conclusive, specification, opinion, contrast and reformulation. The analysis allowed to treat sabe? and entende?as interchangeable items in the same contexts of use, except in contexts of reformulation. The results indicated, on one hand, that medial position and narrative sequences as the preferred for both items, on other hand, there was a low frequency of feedbacks with them, signaling a progressive intonational decline. Between social factors, older and more educated informants encourage the use of sabe? and entende?. Sabe? is the most frequent and corresponds to the less marked category, while entende? is more marked. From these aspects, sabe? is more abstracted and is in a stage more grammaticalized, and entende? still retains some features from your original verb.