Para a história do português brasileiro em Maringá: o uso de artigos por um integrante da comunidade nipo-brasileira

Abstract

In this study we analyze the use of articles by Kenji Ueta, legally recognized as a “pioneer” of Maringá-PR, to discuss the use of articles by that member of the Japanese-Brazilian community in that locality and its implications as a social practice. For this purpose, we examined an interview given by this subject, which is publicly available on YouTube. Ueta learned Portuguese as a second language, maintaining linguistic traces of his contact with Japanese. As a theoretical apparatus, we rely on the perspective of the so-called third wave Sociolinguistics – proposed by Eckert (2005, 2016) and Eckert & McConnell-Ginet (2010). For the linguistic description of the use of articles, we relied on Castilho (2010). The usage data of Senhor Kenji Ueta demonstrated his tendency to omit articles whenever possible, showing a high frequency of occurrences in which the article is not compatible with the gender inflection of the head of the noun phrase, according to previous descriptions of Brazilian Portuguese. The intersection of linguistic and sociocultural data allowed us to understand the identity constructions he expressed in his interviews, positioning himself, through language, as a "member of the Japanese-Brazilian community", as a "Japanese" and, finally, as “photography entrepreneur in Maringá”.