Agripino S. Silveira, University of New Mexico
Frequency effects, specialization of forms, and subject expression in Brazilian Portuguese
It is widely known that Brazilian Portuguese (BP) exhibits variable subject expression (Duarte, 2000; Negrão & Viotti, 2000). However, a number of studies have shown that BP is changing and it is losing this variability, showing much higher rates of pronominal expression (Duarte, 2000).
Traditional analyses of BP grammar have postulated that pronouns should only be overtly expressed in three instances: to disambiguate the inflectional suffix in the verb and the referent in discourse as in (1); and for emphasis as in (2) (Cunha & Cintra, 1985, p. 206). Thus, unless one of these constraints is fulfilled, subjects should be left unexpressed in BP as in example (3). Nevertheless, several studies have found that the rates of pronominal expression in BP are consistently increasing (Duarte, 1993 who showed that the rates of null subjects has decreased from 89% to less than 50% for first person singular). In accordance with Duarte (1993) pronominal expression in the data in study is also very high (77%). Here we will consider pronominal expression for first person singular, which, as a discourse participant, always represents old or given information. The choice for first person singular reference will clearly allow us to examine the postulation posed by traditional grammar regarding the role of expressed subjects and whether they hold in discourse.
The data used for this study come from a subset from naturally occurring two-party conversations between native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese from the city of Fortaleza extracted from the Corpus of Oral Educated Portuguese (PORCUFORT(Lemos Monteiro, 1995)). The two-party conversations used here were randomly selected from the corpus adding up to a total of 42,000 words and to sample both genders and three age groups (20-35, 36-50, and +51). A total of 929 tokens of first person singular referents (in the form of both expressed and unexpressed subjects) in finite clauses were considered for the statistical analysis. These tokens were then coded for several factors that have been found to have an effect on subject expression in BP (Lemos Monteiro, 1994; Menon, 1996) in order to identify those that have a significant effect on this variation.
Results show that the traditional view of subject expression no longer accounts for the patterns that emerge from the data - emphasis, change of referents, and ambiguity of TAM of main verb. This is evidence that subject expression can no longer be accounted for in terms of the morphology of the verb. We propose, on the other hand, that subject expression is part of a long term change due to frequency effects whereby certain high frequency verbs tend to favor subject expression, namely, falar ‘to speak’, fazer ‘to do/make’, and ser ‘to be’; and the specialization of certain lexical items which adopted a more pragmatic function such as achar ‘to think’ and dizer ‘to say’ which behave as epistemic markers in discourse.
(1) Era bom porque eu diminuía de peso... era muito gordinha. “That was good because then I could lose some weight… (I) was a bit chubby.” (Inq. 33:179)
(2) Eu acho isso novidade nos dia de hoje sabe? “I think that kind of new nowadays, you know?” (Inq. 33:126)
(3) Entrei lá no colégio me apresentei ao diretor ele já sabia o meu nome. “(I) entered the school and (I) introduced myself to the principal who already knew my name.” (Inq. 47:168)
References
Cunha, C., & Cintra, L. (1985). Gramática do Português Contemporâneo. Lisboa: Edições João de Sá da Costa. Duarte, M. E. L. (1993). Do Pronome Nulo ao Pronome Pleno: A Trajetória do Sujeito no Português do Brasil.
In Português Brasileiro: uma viagem diacrônica Homenagem a Fernando Tarallo (pp. 107-128).
Duarte, M. E. L. (2000). The Loss of the 'Avoid Pronoun' Principle in Brazilian Portuguese. In M. A. Kato & E.
V. Negrão (Eds.), Brazilian Portuguese and the null subject parameter (pp. 17-36). Madrid: Iberoamericana. Lemos Monteiro, J. (1994). Pronomes Pessoais. Fortaleza, Brasil: Editora Universidade Federal do Ceará.
Lemos Monteiro, J. (1995). PORCUFORT (Corpus of Educated Oral Portuguese from Fortaleza): http://www.geocities.com/Paris/Cathedral/1036/.
Menon, O. P. d. S. (1996). Variação e Mudança: O Papel do Condicionamentos Lingüísticos. Fragmenta, 13,
89-113.
Negrão, E. V., & Viotti, E. (2000). Brazilian Portuguese as a Discourse-Oriented Language. In M. A. Kato & E. V. Negrão (Eds.), Brazilian Portuguese and the Null Subject Parameter (pp. 105-126). Madrid: Iberoamericana.
