Confronting Grammatical Ideology with Usage: Toward a Socially Realistic Account of Spoken Portuguese

Adopting a variationist sociolinguistic perspective, this study addresses the uncritical equation of the prescriptive norms of standard Portuguese with those that underlie spontaneous spoken usage. Exemplifying with a study of the variable strategies for expressing locative relativization, quantitative analysis of spoken language data recorded in São Paulo state turns up a number of important findings. Chief among these is the rarity of the prescriptively ratified pied-piping strategy for forming locative relative clauses. Instead, two alternative options involving onde “where” and que + prepositional phrase-chopping make up the bulk of the variable context in everyday spoken interactions. Our results indicate that detailed analysis of spontaneous speech can considerably enrich our understanding of the variable grammatical processes that operate in actual discourse. We conclude that such findings are of primordial importance to educators, speech-language therapists, and allied professionals, who have a vested interest in access to scientifically grounded accounts of the spoken language.