A unified treatment of omission and expression of third-person pronominal direct subjects and objects in Brazilian Portuguese

• Autor(a) principal: Othero, Gabriel de Ávila
• Data de Publicação: 2019
• Outros Autores: Spinelli, Ana Carolina
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Cadernos de Estudos Linguísticos
• Texto Completo: https://periodicos.sbu.unicamp.br/ojs/index.php/cel/article/view/8654211
• topic: Sujeito pronominal; Objeto nulo; Retomada anafórica.; Pronominal subject; Null object; Anaphoric relation

This paper presents a study on two phenomena involving pronouns that have been occurring concomitantly in the history of Brazilian Portuguese (BP): the realization of a third person direct object and the overt pronoun in subject position. We made a diachronic research that sought to (i) verify if there was an increase of overt pronominal subjects in the interval of 20 years in Porto Alegre (RS); (ii) verify if there was an increase of null objects in the same period, in that same city; and (iii) verify which semantic-discursive features of the referent (animacity, specificity or semantic gender) are acting as triggers for pronoun manifestation in pronominal subject and direct object occurrences. We analyzed two spontaneous spoken language corpora: the VARSUL corpus of the 1990s and the LinguaPOA corpus, produced and transcribed between 2015 and 2018. We also used NURC data, based on Monteiro’s (1994) survey. Our results show that there was only a slight increase in the occurrences of overt subject in the time period, which indicates that this change is stable in BP. In the same way, we also found only a slight increase in null objects in the period, which also seems to indicate the stabilization of a change. In relation to the third objective, we show that the distribution of null vs. overt subjects and null objects vs pronouns could be (to some extent) explained by the semantic gender hypothesis. For some deviant cases, we leave suggestions for the future research.