Linguistic variation in sixteenth-century portuguese: contraction between com and o(s) in Peregrinação

Abstract

The present study focuses on the linguistic behavior of the sequence com + o(s) in sixteenth-century Portuguese in the work Peregrinação, by Fernão Mendes Pinto. The use of the masculine variants not contracted – com o(s) – and contracted – co(s) was analyzed. From a theoretical point of view, the study was based on the Labovian theory of variation, and, from a methodological point of view, it analyzed six independent variables (number of the second element, word class of the second element, syntactic function of the prepositional phrase, structure of the noun phrase internal to the prepositional phrase, first phoneme after the second element and location in the work). Only three of these variables were selected as statistically significant in conditioning the variation between not contracted and contracted forms: the second, the third and the fourth. Therefore, the importance of morphosyntactic factors in conditioning this case of linguistic variation was verified.