Discussing the performance of general nouns in the presence / absence of noun phrase number agreement in Portuguese from Montes Claros

Abstract

The aim of this article is to evaluate the role of the general nouns category in the variable phenomenon consisting of the presence/absence of nominal number agreement in the Portuguese spoken in the municipality of Montes Claros - MG, using the theoretical-methodological assumptions of Variationist Sociolinguistics (Labov, 2008 [1972]; Weinreich, Labov, Herzog, 2006 [1968]). General nouns are elements whose main characteristic is the little semantic content, since they bind a minimum intension and have a maximum extension (Koch; Oesterreicher, 2007 [1990]). The general nouns that we identify in the context of plural in the corpus are: pessoa (‘person’), coisa (‘thing’), trem (‘train’), povo (‘people’), negócio (‘business’) and cara (‘face’), and trem (‘train’), povo (‘people’) and cara (‘face’) did not receive the agreement mark in any of the occurrences. We verified that pessoa (‘person’) favors the maintenance of agreement in relation to the coisa (‘thing’) and negócio (‘business’). Furthermore, general nouns with [+animated] and [+human] features favor the application of the concordance rule over those with [–animated] feature.