Social and structural constraints in lectal cohesion

This paper analyzes co-variation among six sociolinguistic variables of Brazilian Portuguese (diphthongal /ẽ/, coda /r/-retroflexion, coda /r/-deletion, nominal number agreement, third person subject-verb agreement, and first person subject-verb agreement), in a set of structurally related and unrelated variables. The main objective is to assess which social and linguistic factors promote the co-occurrence of different language variants in speakers’ speech. The results show that co-variation can occur both between structurally related variables (e.g. the syntactic variables) and structurally unrelated ones (e.g. /r/-retroflexion and nominal agreement), as well as between variables of different domains (phonological and syntactic variables). We argue that, socially, lectal cohesion is a result of greater density of communication among peers than with out-group speakers, as shown by a higher degree of lectal cohesion among less mobile speakers, living in central areas, and whose parents were also born in the community. Linguistically, independent variables such as phonic salience (which has been demonstrated to correlate with multiple sociolinguistic variables) underlie patterns of co-variation more generally, as less salient variants tend to co-occur more often than more salient ones.