A comparative diachronic analysis of wh-questions in Brazilian and European Portuguese

• Autor(a) principal: Mayara Nicolau de Paula
• Data de Publicação: 2017
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Institucional da UFMG
• Texto Completo: https://doi.org/10.35520/diadorim.2017.v19n0a13603; http://hdl.handle.net/1843/58822; https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7633-4494
• topic: Wh-questions; VS/SV order; Cleft structure; Null subject parameter; European Portuguese; Brazilian Portuguese; Linguística estrutural; Língua portuguesa; Analise linguística (Linguística)

ased on the Principles and Parameters framework (CHOMSKY, 1995), this article presents a diachronic analysis of European Portuguese (EP) Wh-questions and a comparison with the same structures in Brazilian Portuguese (BP). I also present a brief analysis of Wh-question patterns in sociolinguistics interviews recorded in two periods (years 1970/80 and 2010). The initial hypothesis, inferred from recent theoretical descriptions, was that WhVS order would be more frequent in EP and that WhSV, whenever attested, would be constrained by the presence of the cleft-structure. Taking into account the fact that EP is considered a consistent Null Subject Language (NSL), 1st and 2nd person subjects as well as anaphoric subjects would be preferably null. Therefore, EP would exhibit a different behavior from BP, which has become a WhSV system; the rare cases of SV are attested with unacccusative verbs and a lexical DP subject; and this change, as shown by the analyses reported here, runs parallel to the re-setting of the value of the Null Subject Parameter in BP. The sample analyzed for the diachronic study, comprising theater plays written across the 19th and the 20th centuries, is comparable to the Brazilian sample. For the interviews, I used the samples NURC and Concordância for PB and Cordial-Sin and Concordância for EP. The methodology to codify and submit the data to statistical treatment follows the variationist approach (TAGLIAMONTE, 2006; GUY AND ZILLES, 2007). The results show that EP prefers the WhV pattern, confirming its status of a NSL; as for overt subjects, WhVS is the preferred pattern; however, we can observe a slow decrease of VS in the last quarter of the 20th century, suggesting the implementation of a competition with WhSV, triggered by the introduction of clefting in the second half of the 19th century. Once introduced in the system, the cleft structure expands to all Wh patterns, which is confirmed in contemporary speech data