Brazilian Portuguese: a ‘partial’ null subject language?

• Autor(a) principal: Duarte, Maria Eugenia Lamoglia
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Outros Autores: Marins, Juliana Esposito
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Cadernos de Estudos Linguísticos
• Texto Completo: https://periodicos.sbu.unicamp.br/ojs/index.php/cel/article/view/8661660
• topic: Cambio paramétrico; Lenguajes de sujeto nulos coherentes; Idiomas de sujeto nulo parciale; Mudança paramétrica; Línguas de sujeito nulo consistente; Línguas de sujeito nulo parcial; Parametric change; Consistent null subject languages; Partial null subject languages

The aim of this article is twofold. In the first place, we present evidence that the syntactic change towards overt pronominal subjects observed in Brazilian Portuguese is not a stable phenomenon; rather, our empirical results allow to follow the parametric change in course and to identify the progressive loss of crucial properties related to ‘consistent’ null subject languages. The contrastive analysis with European Portuguese shows the stronger and the weaker structural contexts in this continuous battle towards the implementation of overt pronouns. Personal sentences (with definite and ‘indefinite’ – arbitrary and generic – subjects, usually referred as “impersonal”) are analyzed in more detail than those we consider impersonal sentences, which include a variety of structures, with climate, existential and unaccusative verbs, . They are, however, shown to have been deeply affected by the re-setting of the value of the Null Subject Parameter. Then, we will briefly compare Brazilian Portuguese with Finnish null subjects to conclude that Brazilian Portuguese does not seem to fit the group of the so called ‘partial’ null subject languages, which seem to exhibit null subjects in very restricted contexts, have a lexical expletive in apparent variation with null and generic subjects as well as in impersonal sentences, when it seems to be merged to avoid a verb-initial sentence.