SP2010: building a sample of paulistano speech

• Grant number: 11/09278-6
• Support Opportunities: Regular Research Grants
• Start date: December 01, 2011
• End date: November 30, 2013
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics - Sociolinguistics and Dialectology
• Principal Investigator: Ronald Beline Mendes
• Grantee: Ronald Beline Mendes
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Associated researchers: Livia Oushiro

Abstract

This project aims to collect, transcribe, and making available a current sample of Paulistano speech, to be composed of 60 sociolinguistic interviews. It also aims at facilitating the development of descriptive and analytical work on this understudied speech community. Making this sample (recordings and transcripts) available on the Internet will contribute to disseminating and strengthening this field of research, not only at USP, but also at other research institutes. Bearing the complex sociodemographics of São Paulo in mind, we propose that this corpus be stratified according to three social parameters - speaker's age, sex/gender, and level of education - in order to obtain, within two years time, a comprehensive and representative speech sample of the city. In constructing this sample, we will also be attentive to differentiations of social class, region of residence, and family generation in the city, as well as to their role in Paulistanos' evaluations of what it means to "be Paulistano" and "speak like a Paulistano"; this answers to the basic sociolinguistic premise that the interest in linguistic variants lies in their social meaning (Chambers, 1995). The methodology for speech recording is based on Variationist Sociolinguistics (Labov, 1972, 2006; Tagliamonte, 2006) and the criteria for transcribing the recordings are designed so as to facilitate their manipulation through new computational tools (e.g. R, ELAN). (AU)