ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the plural number concord in Brazilian Portuguese, whose presence is required by grammatical tradition and whose absence is explicitly stigmatized by speakers in general, especially those with more education in urban areas, as well as by the media. It reveals a direction of flow exactly opposite that found by Poplack and colleagues toward increased usage of standard concord. Concord is certainly taught in the school system, and is systematically imposed in the written language, but it is also a norm of the wider speech community and is accepted by nearly all as the right way to speak. The chapter discusses the differences for individual speakers from the urban area of Rio de Janeiro in recent increases in frequency of use of standard marked forms in variable third-person plural subject/verb number concord (S/VC) and noun phrase number concord. The case studied by Poplack that most closely resembles number concord in Portuguese is the conditional in an "if' clause.
