<i>Language</i><i> on</i><i> Stage</i> Project: plays as a source for the socio-historical study of language

Abstract

We present the proposal of the Language on Stage project, and exemplify its application from a study on the change in the verbal morphology of Brazilian Portuguese in conditional sentences inserted by the conjunction -se (if). This project proposes the construction of corpora of Brazilian plays (19th to 21st centuries) and the characterization of the social profile of their characters, using categories defined according to the reconstruction of the socio-historical contexts of the analyzed periods. For that we established an interdisciplinary dialogue with History, Sociology, Anthropology and Theater. The results demonstrate the relevance of works with plays in the field of Historical Sociolinguistics and of the proposed categorization for the social variables sex/gender, age, education, social class, and ethnicity, revealing correlations between these variables and processes of linguistic variation and change.