De ´tchê´ a ´oxente´: Acomodação Linguística de Falantes Gaúchos em João Pessoa

Abstract

Linguistic Accommodation Theory, developed by Giles in 1987, has its origin in the Social Psychology field and studies the linguistic phenomena that arise from face to face communication. In this work, we seek to understand how the Linguistic Accommodation of speakers born in Rio Grande do Sul, residing in the city of João Pessoa, in Paraíba, occurs, from the perspective of Communication Accommodation Theory. Therefore, we conducted the investigation of the phenomenon of palatalization or non-palatalization of coronal fricative /s/ in final coda position, being the alveolar pronunciation ([s], [Ʒ]) in the dialect of Rio Grande do Sul and the palatal pronunciation ([ʃ]) in the dialect of João Pessoa. Thus, we propose to verify the occurrence of the linguistic accommodation process, identifying the variables involved in this process and to investigate the social factors that contribute to the accommodation process. The corpus of the research is composed of two informants from Rio Grande do Sul residing in João Pessoa for over ten years and are over 23 years old. Initially, we worked with eight informants, that were classified according to gender, age and time of exposure to the dialect of João Pessoa. Data were collected through interviews, and the analysis was carried out qualitatively, through a comparative case study. From the data analysis, we conclude that the most influential variables in the linguistic accommodation process were the age of arrival of informants to the capital of Paraiba and attitudinal questions about the culture and dialect of João Pessoa.