Vou passar [para] buscar você: variação de para com valor final (intra e interoracional) na fala do oeste catarinense

Abstract

This dissertation examines the use of para with a final function (intra- and inter-sentential) in the speech of 40 informants from western Santa Catarina, specifically from the Chapecó city. In Chapecó speech, in some contexts, this conector can be omitted without semantic loss as well as appearing in its full, reduced, or agglutinated form: “Eu saio [para] caminhar”. The objective of this study is to identify and describe the presence and/or absence of para with final value (intra- and inter-sentential) in the speech of informants from Chapecó participating in the VARSUL (Linguistic Variation in Southern Brazil) project and VMPOSC (Variation and Change in the Portuguese of Western Santa Catarina) project. This study is grounded in the theoretical and methodological principles of sociofunctionalism, an approach that has been gaining traction in Brazil (see Oliveira, Silva, and Scherre, 1996; Naro, Braga, 2000, among others), discussed in greater depth in Tavares (2003), Görski and Tavares (2006, 2013, 2017), and in Tavares and Görski (2015). The methodology employed is based on the empirical analysis of data extracted from sociolinguistic interviews with Chapeco’s informants who were selected according to stratification criteria such as sex/gender, age group, and educational level. The data were coded and subjected to statistical modeling using the R Studio software which performed logistic regression to identify and measure the factors influencing variation. The main results indicate that although the presence of the connector, especially in its reduced pra form, remains predominant. Its absence constitutes a productive variant in chapecoense speech. The comparative analysis of the corpora points to an ongoing process of linguistic change marked by the retreat of the form para in favor of reduced and coalescent realizations, such as pro. In the most recent corpus, the data also indicate that this shift is now more clearly driven by social factors, particularly the preference for omitting the connector among male speakers and younger speakers. In contrast, factors such as the presence of a pause and formal style continue to favor the maintenance of the explicit form, confirming the role of prosodic structure and stylistic monitoring in the distribution between the presence and absence of para.