Prescrição gramatical e uso linguístico: a questão da concordância no português do Brasil

The aim of this paper is twofold, first, to raise questions on language teaching and, second, to focus on plural agreement in Brazilian Portuguese, a stigmatized phenomenon frequently used to exemplify and explain the differences between Brazilian and European Portuguese. The position argued is that there is a plurality of norms and that is necessary to relate linguistic to social data and observe the phenomenon from place to place, in order to understand the variable patterns of agreement detected. The analyzed sample was extracted from informal interviews of The Linguistic Atlas of Brazil, men and women with high or low formal education. We conclude that the empirical findings and demographic data should be taken into account, if we pursue an effective language teaching.