| dc.description.abstract | This study focuses on how language variation correlates with the social structure of a terreiro, the place for religious practices of Candomblé, an Afro-Brazilian religion. It sets out to examine the plural configuration of the noun phrase in Brazilian Portuguese in the speech of men who are followers of a religious community. The goal was to determine whether marked and unmarked plural forms of the noun phrase were indexical of social factors across participants. Data were collected through ethnographically-informed research during five months in Salvador, Brazil. The study involved participant-observation, field notes, and semi-structured interviews with 18 informants who were grouped by age (younger/older), schooling (higher/lower), sexuality (gay/straight), and role within the terreiro (rodantes if they can get into a trance and are inhabited by orixás – the gods in the religion, and ogans if they cannot). It looked at the extent to which plural marking in the noun phrase was constrained by different internal and social factors. Quantitative analyses have shown effects of internal constraints as independent fixed effects over the pluralisation or not of the noun phrase. They also shown interactions between social factors with effects over the pluralisation of the noun phrase. Qualitative analyses of the interviews have unravelled the reasons why the interactions take place the way they do. They also suggested that informants make use of certain mechanisms to take up positionings through metapragmatic evaluations that construct agentive indexicality in the shaping of selves, which helped uncover how the terreiro is organised. The work brings contributions to a better understanding of how the terreiro is sociolinguistically structured in terms of social positionings, to Candomblé more specifically, as well as to sociolinguistics more broadly. Keywords: Sociolinguistics, Noun Phrase, Candomblé, Age, Schooling, Role | en_US |
