The "teu/seu" variation: a diachronic and synchronic study

The current work is oriented towards the study of the possessive form "teu" in opposition to the form "seu", through two viewpoints: in diachrony and in synchrony. Regarding the diachronic analysis, the use of possessive strategies is observed in personal letters from different families dated from 1970 to 1980. In total, 143 letters were used to compose the corpus, however, to conduct a more reliable analysis, the letters were divided into 10 letters per decade.Regarding the synchronic analysis, the variation between possessive forms was observed through skits from the show "Porta dos Fundos". In this manner, we seek to describe the use of these forms, noting their uses according to the communicative situation established by the standards discussed in the theory of Power and Solidarity (BROWN; GILMAN, 1960). The study also takes into account the theoretical assumptions of quantitative theory variationist Labovian (LABOV, 1994), aiming to identify the linguistic and extralinguistic factors that determine the use of pronouns of possessive pronouns referring to the second person singular.In summary, this preliminary study suggests that the possessive forms tend to track the subject's behavior in the diachronic and the possessive "seu" apparently has a multi-functional behavior.