Speakers' subjective evaluations of direct object pronouns in Brazilian Portuguese

Abstract

Direct object pronouns show considerable variation in Brazilian Portuguese, where normative clitic pronouns compete with their tonic counterparts. However, no prior studies have investigated empirically speaker evaluations of these competing pronoun variants. We created a perception experiment of direct object pronouns in spoken Brazilian Portuguese, in order to investigate the role of attitudes and social evaluations in language variation. Results from 160 native speakers show broad evaluative differences between clitic and tonic pronouns, while at the same time showing individual differences by pronoun and effects of the context of utterance. We conclude that the role that social evaluation plays in usage preferences in BP should be re-assessed based on studies linking subjective attitudes with grammatical choices.