The VSO order with transitive verbs in diachronic journalistic data from European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese

• Autor(a) principal: Gravina, Aline Peixoto
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Working Papers em Lingüística (Online)
• Texto Completo: https://periodicos.ufsc.br/index.php/workingpapers/article/view/75298

This study has two objectives: i) to present historical quantitative/comparative data of the VSO order with transitive verbs in finite sentences in European Portuguese (EP) and Brazilian Portuguese (BP); ii) to describe and to identify the possibilities of interpretation of the subject in that order in each of these grammars. The corpus consists of Portuguese and Brazilian newspapers that circulated in the 19th and in the 20th centuries. Quantitatively, the work demonstrated that the VSO order with transitive verbs is a restricted context in both EP and BP, however, in BP the frequency of occurrence was even lower when compared to EP. It was found the evidence of accomplishment of the VSO order by the reading criteria of thetic judgment in both EP and BP, mostly linked to the notion of evidentiality, as well as the evidence of accomplishment of the VSO order by subject's double focus (informational and contrastive focus). However, in BP data of the 20th century, at the same period in which there was a greater decrease in the VSO order, there was also a decrease in contexts with evidence of thetic reading, pointing out as preferential contexts with evidence of the subject's double focus.