‘Aqui compra se gallinhas e ms alguma cousa’: a study on the variable phenomenon of concordance in the context of synthetic or pronominal passive, in handwritten letters of the 19th century

Abstract

In the studies that we have developed on the uses of the reflective SE, we either conclude about the tendency to erase it, or we reflect on its trajectory in the exercise of the various syntactic-semantic functions that it has assumed. In this article, in particular, we bring the 'se', under a variationist approach (LABOV, 1972), not only to describe its behavior as a resource of indeterminacy, in handwritten letters of the 19th century, but also to deal with its competition with the 'se passive'. It is a research that studies the relationship between the decrease in the frequency of agreement in structures with SE and the interpretation of that reflective, either as indeterminate, or as passive (GALVES, 1996, p. 392). The corpus of our research consists of 44 handwritten letters, dating from 1879 to 1889, thus representing a decade of records, in Portuguese, in the Amazon of the golden days of rubber. Our results, although partial, corroborate the path pointed out by Bechara (2004, p. 178): from passive to indeterminacy - no (more) 'compram-se galinhas', but 'compra-se galinhas', as illustrated in the title of this article; indicating that, in this syntactic context, the actions expressed by the verbs are assumed from their agents and not from their patients (VILELA; KOCH, 2001, p. 181).