The Portuguese of Western Bahia: corpus constitution in Santa Maria da Vitoria

Abstract

This paper aims to discuss the methodological aspects of corpus constitution and, therefore, presents the methodology and the survey of linguistic data used as research object of the thesis “The Portuguese spoken in the West of Bahia: constitution of corpus and analysis of relativization strategies”. This project is linked to the project “Speech of beyond São Francisco” (FIGUEIREDO, 2015), by the UFBA, in partnership with the project “Rural Portuguese of the West of Bahia”, by the UFOB. This research expects to contribute to the understanding and linguistic description of speakers from the Western Bahia and their socio-historical formation, through the constitution of corpus in Santa Maria da Vitória (SAMAVI) and Montevidinha. With the collecting of the vernacular speech of the quilombola community of Montevidinha and SAMAVI, the research aims the analysis of sociolinguistic and sociohistorical studies, rescuing the importance of the region, having in view of historical data perceived through oral, linguistic, cultural and social narratives. For the methodological construction of the research, we based on the Labovian Sociolinguistics approach, through the lifting of social cells, interviews and linguistic transcriptions. Our results cover 12 interviews (11 completed and 1 in progress) of the speakers of Montevidinha. In SAMAVI, 12 completed sociolinguistic interviews were recorded in a corpus with the following social stratification: three age groups (Group I – 25-35 years old, Group II – 45-55 years old, and Group III – above 65 years old) and two sexes (men and women). The study can contribute to the understanding and linguistic description of the speeches of the West of Bahia. It also contributes to the documentation of their socio-historical formation, to the expansion of sociolinguistic studies in Brazil and the understanding of the socio-historical formation of the Brazilian Portuguese.