The emergence of Brazilian Portuguese: Earlier evidence for the development of a partial null subject grammar

Humberto Borges,Acrisio Pires

doi:10.3765/plsa.v2i0.4096

Abstract

Brazilian Portuguese (henceforth, BP) is currently analyzed as a partial null subject language (NSL). This work shows the earliest attested changes in the properties of null subjects in the Goiás dialect of Brazilian Portuguese. We analyze original data from colonial period manuscripts written in Goiás, a state located in Brazil’s center-west region, and provide empirical evidence of the loss of null subjects in BP grammars in historical data between the 18th and 19th century, preceding the period for which these changes have been reported regarding other dialects of BP. The analysis of our 18th and 19th century corpus shows an early significant rise in the realization of overt subjects. In addition, the loss of verb-subject (VS) free inversion, a property common to NSLs, drops from 57% in the 18th century to only 22.5% in the 19th century. On the other hand, a potential impoverishment of theverbal paradigm did not play a significant role in this early rise of overt subjects: only 15% of the clauses with a plural external argument in the 19th century data did not show overt agreement between the verb and the external argument, and all of them occur strictly with unaccusative or existential verbs. We take this as evidence that the loss of null subjects in BP was primarily linked to the loss of free VS-inversion, and not to the loss of clausal agreement. We propose that D-feature in T (an EPP-feature) was valued by V-movement to T in the 18th century, yielding a consistent NSL (Holmberg 2010). We argue that the loss of the requirement of the D-feature in T(tense) was a primary trigger for the partial loss of null subjects and parallel loss of free inversion from the 18th to the 19th century in Goiás BP, giving then rise to a partial NSL (without a D-feature in T).

Highlights

In the last three decades, there has been somewhat extensive research on the changes in the syntax of null subjects in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) in comparison to European Portuguese (EP), a consistent null subject language (NSL) (e.g. Roberts and Kato 1993, Kato and Negrão 2000, and articles therein)
Building upon insights from Holmberg (2010), we propose instead that the loss of the D-feature in T in the BP grammar is involved in the loss of passive SE-constructions, the decrease of impersonal SE-constructions, and the rise of an innovative kind of construction in BP in comparison with EP, namely impersonal null subject constructions in 3rd-person singular, as in (24b), which are apparently restricted to partial NSLs
In the case of SE-constructions with both passive and impersonal interpretation in the eighteenth-century BP grammar, we suggest that the D-feature in T is valued by the internal DP argument, so that the derivation does not generate an indeterminate null pronoun in spec TP

Summary

Introduction

In the last three decades, there has been somewhat extensive research on the changes in the syntax of null subjects in BP in comparison to European Portuguese (EP), a consistent NSL (e.g. Roberts and Kato 1993, Kato and Negrão 2000, and articles therein). Duarte (2000), building on Duarte’s earlier work (Duarte 1993), for instance, shows that most pronominal subject positions (74%) in her 1992 corpus of Brazilian plays were filled with overt pronouns Her corpus is composed of 1100 clauses written between 1842 and 1992. She argues that the requirement for overt (pronominal) subjects, distinguishing BP from European Portuguese (hereafter, EP), did not begin until the 20th century She suggests that BP is in a process of change from a NSL to a non-NSL, such as English and French, especially due to the restructuring of the BP pronominal paradigm and the impoverishment of the BP verbal paradigm, and shows a significant increase in the number of overt subjects in BP in the context of pronominal resumption between 1937 and 1992.

Methods

Results

Conclusion