Brazilian Portuguese: variation in second-person singular possessive pronouns teu/seu in spoken language

This paper investigated the frequency of occurrence of second-person singular possessive pronouns—specifically, the variants teu and seu—in the vernacular of Caxias, MA. The overall aim was to quantitatively analyze the use of these variants by relating them to linguistic variables (gender inflection, number inflection, possessive position, formal parallelism, syntactic function, and animacy of the possessed phrase) and social variables (gender, age, and education level). Situated within the field of Variationist Sociolinguistics, the article is grounded in the theoretical premises of authors such as Weinreich, Labov, and Herzog (1968) and Labov (1972), who emphasize both the inherent heterogeneity and systematicity of linguistic variation and the influence of social context on the processes of linguistic variation and change. The methodology adopted consisted of a quantitative study utilizing a corpus from the ALFMA project, which comprised 72 recorded interviews that were transcribed and subjected to descriptive statistical analyses. In the search for the dependent variable—the possessive pronouns teu and seu—56 occurrences were identified, of which 6 belonged to the teu variant and 50 to the seu variant. The data were organized and analyzed according to the linguistic and social variables, allowing for comparisons across different usage contexts. The results demonstrated that the seu variant is predominantly used, accounting for 89% of the data, while teu appears in only 11% of the occurrences.