The use of existential verbs on XVIII, XIX and XX centuries: variation on portuguese spoken in pernambuco

This paper aims to describe the use of existential verbs across the time in Portuguese. In order to do it we take as corpus manuscripts from centuries XVIII, XIX and XX, written by people who lived in Pernambuco and we also use the methodology of Sociolinguistics (cf. LABOV, 1994) for quantification of data. The result shows that since the century XVIII, at least, there was variation in ascribing existence between the verbs ser, haver, ter and existir in Portuguese. However, there has always existed this robust use of haver to express existence, which corroborates studies already done on this subject. These studies indicate that in modern Brazilian Portuguese there is a salient use of haver in existential sentences on written, otherwise, on speech data, sentences with ter are more used.