We focus on nominal agreement and on verbal agreement in the third person plural in urban varieties of European Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese and Portuguese of Sao Tome, based on the speech of individuals with primary, secondary and university education level, distributed, yet, in three age groups and sex. In order to describe these varieties, structural and social motivations have been evaluated in the light of the assumptions of the Theory of Variation and Change (WEINREICH; LABOV; HERZOG, 1968). Results from different analyzes, developed under the Project Comparative Study of Patterns of Agreement in African, Brazilian and European varieties of Portuguese, suggest that, although the three varieties tend to adopt plural marks in both the Noun Phrase and the Verbal Phrase, agreement presents distinct status in each case. In European Portuguese, linguistic data cannot be described as effectively variable - it is, according to Labov (2003), a categorical rule within the nominal agreement and semi-categorical rule within the verbal one. In BrazilianPortuguese and in Portuguese of Sao Tome, both rules are variable.
Noun agreement; Verb agreement; Sociolinguistics; Varieties of Portuguese
