Variação do Imperativo de 2ª pessoa em Enunciados de Provas da Escola de Formação de Professores Ferraz Bomboco (Huambo, Angola)

Resumo

The present paper aims to conduct a sociolinguistic study of the variation of strategies of affirmative second-person imperative (second-person form and third-person form) in the instructions of tests produced by Angolan teachers of the Teacher Training School Ferraz Bomboco, in the Huambo province. Thus, we aim to identify the factors favouring the variant forms of the imperative, based on the researches developed mainly for Brazilian Portuguese. Our hypothesis is that the imperative, in the third-person form, would be more present in written texts of a non-dialogical nature, in the case of test instructions, as they are controlled and monitored texts. We have also taken Labovian Sociolinguistics (Labov, 1972) as a theoretical support. As a methodological tool, we employed the statistical program Goldvarb-X (Sankoff; Tagliamonte; Smith, 2005), in order to assist us in the quantitative analysis of the sample data. Regarding the structural factors, the results showed that the group titled “regularity of verbs”
was relevant in the multivariate analysis, as Scherre (2002) showed for Brazilian Portuguese. The least marked regular verbs favoured the imperative-second-person form, while the more marked irregular verbs favoured the third-person form. As for the extralinguistic factors, the observed results show that the imperative mood in the third-person form occurs mostly in the test statements of Portuguese language and entrepreneurship tests, whereas in other disciplines
there was a more relevant variation of the two imperative strategies, possibly revealing the vernacular of teachers and students.