This paper addresses a production/evaluation mismatch in Brazilian Portuguese: speakers from São Paulo (SP) and São Luís (SL) use subjunctive (S) instead of indicative (I) about 70% of the time, with similar linguistic and social conditioning, but SP speakers are believed not to use S, while SL speakers supposedly always do.
Through a matched-guise experiment, 217 SL- and 284 SP-listeners listened to two speakers from each city in guises based on morphology (S vs. I) and clause type (adverbial vs. complement), evaluating speakers on various scales (intelligence, education, formality, etc).
PCA and regression modeling suggest that competence is directly associated with S in SL, but is a secondary meaning in SP. Different effects of clause type and listener education across communities demonstrate not only that perception does not necessarily match production but also that grammatical variation serves for constructing social meaning (a fact that has been questioned in the literature).
