Morphological specification of nominative pronouns, verbal agreement and null subjects in brasilian portuguese

• Autor(a) principal: Nunes, Jairo
• Data de Publicação: 2020
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Fórum Linguístico
• Texto Completo: https://periodicos.ufsc.br/index.php/forum/article/view/1984-8412.2020v17nespp4658

The fact that Brazilian Portuguese (BP) is not a canonical pro-drop language has been often associated with the weakening of its verbal agreement system. However, leaving aside the agreement triggered by the pronoun tu, Standard BP and Standard European Portuguese display the same paradigm of verbal agreement inflection. In this paper I argue that this inconsistency may find an explanation in the morphological specifications of agreement morphemes in BP. More specifically, I contend that its nominative pronouns are maximally underspecified (NUNES, 2019), which is reflected on the f-features that T may bear (FERREIRA, 2000; NUNES, 2008) and how these features get valued under Agree. Assuming that pronominal null subjects result from an ellipsis operation licensed when T has its most prominent feature valued (MARTINS & Nunes, forthcoming), I provide an account of the different degrees of acceptability of null subjects in BP depending on the elided pronoun, as well as the inverse correlation between availability of null subjects and availability of hyper-raising.