Abstract
We examine the competition in Brazilian Portuguese 2SG direct object pronoun expression between clitic te and tonic você (e.g. Eu te vi ~ Eu vi você). We offer data from an online forced-choice survey, analyzed using mixed-effects logistic regression, to show that dialectal subject pronoun preference (tu/você) and contrast both play a significant role in conditioning this choice. Furthermore, we find that contrast, despite its traditional treatment as binary, shows gradient effects on pronoun choice- while te is the preferred DO pronoun overall, você is the variant preferred in contrastive contexts, especially in cases of double contrast.-----------------------------------------------------------------------------EVIDÊNCIAS EXPERIMENTAIS POR PREFERÊNCIAS PRONOMINAIS DE OBJETOS DIRETOS DE 2SG EM PORTUGUÊS BRASILEIROExaminamos a competição no português brasileiro entre o pronome clítico te e o tônico você para a expressão de objetos diretos de segunda pessoa singular (Eu te vi ~ Eu vi você). Apresentamos dados recolhidos de um questionário, e analizados utilizando a regressão logística de efeitos mistos, para mostrar que tanto a preferência do pronome de sujeito (você/tu) quanto o contraste têm um papel importante na escolha do pronome de objeto direto. Também, o contraste, apesar do tratamento tradicional como binário, mostra efeitos gradáveis na escolha de pronome- enquanto o te é preferido em termos globais, você é preferido em contextos contrastivos, especialmente nos casos de duplo contraste.---Original em inglês.
Highlights
Our data (N=2119) show that te (67.7%, n=1434) is selected as an object pronoun just over twice as often as você (32.3%, n=685). This is one particular site in the pronominal grammar of Brazilian Portuguese (BP), where the clitic form remains more frequent than the tonic form, as opposed to, for instance, 3rd person direct object (DO), where the clitics are nearly extinct in conversation (Schwenter & Silva 2003)
We find a similar result for 2nd person singular (2SG) DOs in BP: even though tonic você is preferred in contrastive contexts it still varies with atonic te, and this variation is predictable based on the strength of the contrast being expressed
We have shown that, contra many grammatical descriptions (e.g. Perini 2010), te and você do not vary livremente (‘freely’) or indiferentemente (‘interchangeably’) but rather are sensitive to a clear discourse-pragmatic motivation, according to which você is the preferred form in contrastive contexts for many speakers, while te is
Summary
Personal pronouns in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) (and European Portuguese; see PretoRodas 1972; Lara Bermejo 2017) are well-known for displaying a so-called mistura de tratamento (‘address mixture’) whereby distinct parts of the pronominal paradigm combine to create a system that “mixes” forms with different person/number combinations. Perhaps the most famous of the many cases of mixture in BP is the use of the 2nd person singular (2SG) pronominal forms, which is characterized as “o uso simultâneo, por parte do falante, dos pronomes tu e você (e suas formas oblíquas e possessivas correspondentes, além do imperativo verbal) quando ele se dirige a uma segunda pessoa” (Bagno 2009: 237). This case of mixture originated from the development and adoption of the grammatically 3rd person singular (3SG) form você (< vossa mercê ‘your mercy’), and has been partially combined with the original paradigm corresponding to the 2SG pronoun tu. Perhaps the most famous of the many cases of mixture in BP is the use of the 2nd person singular (2SG) pronominal forms, which is characterized as “o uso simultâneo, por parte do falante, dos pronomes tu e você (e suas formas oblíquas e possessivas correspondentes, além do imperativo verbal) quando ele se dirige a uma segunda pessoa” (Bagno 2009: 237).. Perhaps the most famous of the many cases of mixture in BP is the use of the 2nd person singular (2SG) pronominal forms, which is characterized as “o uso simultâneo, por parte do falante, dos pronomes tu e você (e suas formas oblíquas e possessivas correspondentes, além do imperativo verbal) quando ele se dirige a uma segunda pessoa” (Bagno 2009: 237).7 This case of mixture originated from the development and adoption of the grammatically 3rd person singular (3SG) form você (< vossa mercê ‘your mercy’), and has been partially combined with the original paradigm corresponding to the 2SG pronoun tu. Thomas (1974: 27) states explicitly that, “All the words used as subjects of verbs with the meaning you [...] may be used as direct objects of a verb” and provides the example Eu não compreendo você ‘I don’t understand you’ as illustration. Whitlam (2011: 57) opines in a similar fashion, but appears to reverse the preferences: “In the spoken language [of Brazil], the 2SG object pronoun te may be used as an alternative to você.” Overall, the received wisdom in the previous literature, while admittedly both scarce and terse, uniformly holds that there is no functional (or, for that matter, social) differentiation between te and você when used as DO pronouns
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