The relative clauses in the minutes of Ouro Preto city council public hearings

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to make a quantitative survey of relative clauses found in the minutes of the City Council public hearings of Ouro Preto / MG. The use of prepositional relative clauses in Brazilian Portuguese presents standard and non-standard variants. The data presented by Mollica (1977) and Tarallo (1983) show that the standard variant has been gradually replaced by the non-standard variant. In this sense, our survey was conducted in order to verify if the authors’ findings proceed since the minutes researched here are supposedly spontaneous speech representations. The results have shown that the non-standard PP-chopping was the one most found in the minutes selected. This can be an indication that aside from being a phenomenon present in the speech, it might be a phenomenon being transferred to the written language sphere; since the minutes’ authors have not turned the occurrences of the non-standard into standard variants in the phenomenon observed in the documents analyzed.