Sociolinguistic perception in São Paulo

• Grant number: 15/14324-8
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research
• Start date: November 17, 2015
• End date: July 16, 2016
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics - Sociolinguistics and Dialectology
• Principal Investigator: Ronald Beline Mendes
• Grantee: Ronald Beline Mendes
• Host Investigator: Kathryn Campbell-Kibler
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Ohio State University, Columbus, United States

Abstract

This research project proposes the analysis of perception data on two relevant variables in São Paulo Portuguese: noun-phrase number agreement and [en] pronunciation (with or without a diphthong) in words such as setenta 'seventy'. In addition, this project proposes a third analysis, in which these two variables are crisscrossed. The experiments are designed according to the matched-guise technique (Lambert et al. 1960, Campbell-Kibler 2006, 2009) and they will attempt to determine which social meanings are linked to the variants of those variables, as well as how such meanings are structured in indexical fields (Eckert 2008). The quantitative analyses will be developed with different statistical packages in R (R Core Team 2014). Descriptively, this proposal is interested in the perception of Paulistanos on these locally relevant variables. Theoretically, it has the potential to contribute to the understanding of how sociolinguistic perception works, with the inclusion of Portuguese in the fairly short list of languages on which perception analyses have been carried out. If approved, the project will be supervised by Prof. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler, one of the most important specialists in sociolinguistic perception. (AU)