A determinação de gênero feminino no português brasileiro

Abstract

This present doctoral dissertation discusses gender variation through the attribution of feminine gender to four words: ‘german’, ‘chief’, ‘thief’, and ‘president’, in addition to other lexias used to name the concepts “woman born in Germany”, “woman in charge”, “woman who steals”, “woman in the presidency”. The analysis of gender marking takes into consideration the informants’ selection of use and their evaluation and value judgements of the mentioned forms, which provides a discussion concerning the expression of sexist ideals through language, supported by gender studies that are associated to issues regarding women’s work, the presence of women in the politics as well as the reproduction of these ideals through language which, nowadays, is considerable active with the discussion of non-binary gender in Portuguese and other languages. This work is based on the theoretical and methodological assumptions of Dialectology (Chambers; Trudgill, 1994; Ferreira; Cardoso, 1994), Pluridimensional Geolinguistics (Cardoso, 2010), and Variationist Sociolinguistics (Weinreich; Labov; Herzog, 2006 [1968]; Labov, 2008 [1972]) which aims to analyze linguistic data through a quantitative and qualitative bias. The linguistic data were obtained from the questionnaire from Linguistic Atlas of Brazil Project (ALiB), applied to 1,100 informants from 250 cities, distributed across the five regions of Brazil, both in inner cities and state capitals. The informants are divided according to their education (uncompleted elementary and undergraduate degree), two age groups (18 to 30 and 50 to 65 years old), and sex, providing social criteria that can indicate motivations that influence their linguistic choices. The results obtained by listening to the audios were cataloged and are presented in tables, graphs, and linguistic maps, allowing the visualization of data and comparison among different social groups alongside to the discussion of the themes that seek to explain the motivations of the linguistic choices. All in all, it is possible to reach results that indicate the preference for linguistic forms that are equal for both genders, as in ‘chefe’ and ‘presidente’ other than ‘chefa’ and ‘presidenta’, the identification of unexpected forms used instead of the standard form ‘alemã’, and the competition between the variants ‘ladra’ and ‘ladrona’. Besides that, the work identified various suffixes that carry feminine marks and can be used as an alternative to the expected suffixes and the demonstration of doubt and lack of knowledge of specific linguistic forms to name the questioned concepts by the informants. The results may contribute to the understanding of the category of linguistic gender in Portuguese as more diverse and plural than has been defined in prescriptive grammars.