Variation in verb agreement with “a gente” in European Portuguese

Abstract

This paper aims to prove that the verbal agreement with the pronoun “a gente” (the people) constitutes variable phenomenon in European Portuguese. The corpora, stratified equitably in relation to social variables education, age and gender, comes from the “Reference Corpus of Contemporary Portuguese”. For analysis, we used the Theory of Linguistic Variation (LABOV 1972, 1994). The results indicate in the variable phenomenon the prevalence of use of the third person singular, conditioned by linguistic factors “explicitness of the subject” and “tense” and by social factors “education”, “age” and “gender”.