Linguistic variations present in personal letters: emphasis on pronominal placement

Abstract

This article aimed to analyze the occurrence of the use of enclisis and proclisis in personal letters exchanged between a couple of dating partners in the 1990s, with the objective of investigating social variation between the correspondents. A total of four letters were analyzed—two from each participant—the number being determined by the amount of correspondence written by the male participant, who had written only two letters. Before presenting the results of the research, an overview was provided regarding linguistic variation in general, how sociolinguistics was established as a theory, and some studies focused on pronominal placement and letter analysis. Authors such as Labov (2006 [1996], 2008), Coelho et al. (2010), Biazolli (2016), Silva (2002), Sales (2007), among others, were referenced. As this is an analysis that seeks to relate the use of pronominal placement to the social variation of the senders, the article contributes to studies grounded in sociolinguistics, aiming to relate grammatical choices to subjective factors of the correspondents. The analytical methodology used was qualitative with an interpretivist basis, focusing on both form and content (Flick, 2004; Bardin, 2011; Miles & Huberman, 2014). From the analyses, it was possible to observe that the only variable factor showing any distinction between participants was gender, in which the male participant used enclisis more frequently than the female participant. Other social variables did not affect the writing.