Elapsed time expressions in Graciliano Ramos’ personal letters

Abstract

Elapsed Time Expressions (ETEs) are a phenomenon of recent study in Brazilian Portuguese, and unprecedented in Alagoas Portuguese in synchronic past. Among the analyzes carried out, a large part has a synchronic focus, investigating current Portuguese in its varieties. Therefore, this work aims to analyze this variation with the theoretical contribution of Variationist Sociolinguistics (LABOV, 2008 [1972]) and Historical Sociolinguistics (ROMAINE, 1982) to explain the conditioning factors in the use of this phenomenon from the corpus of 112 personal letters of the writer from Alagoas Graciliano Ramos at the beginning of the 20th century.  Thus, the work justifies itself by expanding the research on the Alagoas variety of Portuguese. As results, 77 data were found referring to the variants “Haver” and “Fazer”, which correspond to a percentage of 86% (66 data) for the first and 14% (11 data) for the second, which motivates this study to wonder on the absence of variants “Ter” and “Estar com” in the letters. For quantitative data analysis, the RStudio program was used, which provided univariate analyzes and resulted in the significance of the independent variables aspect (p<0.05), complementizer (p<0.001) and order (p<0.001) in conditioning the variants of the observed ETEs. For the qualitative analysis, however, the linguistic aspects of the data found were observed, which preliminarily resulted in the constitution of hypotheses and new research paths for future works that investigate Alagoas Portuguese in its historical perspective to expand the data on this phenomenon and verify whether the absence of “Ter” and “Estar com” occurs in other corpora, in addition to bringing new questions about ETEs.