Uma análise diacrônica da sintaxe dos clíticos pronominais em peças de teatro portuguesas e brasileiras: história social e contato

Abstract

This dissertation aims to compare the grammars of Brazilian Portuguese (BP) and European Portuguese (EP), based on an analysis of the syntax of clitics, one of the main factors of distinction between both varieties. To achieve it, besides grammatical aspects, this work takes into account factors linked to Brazilian socio-history that influenced the formation of BP, such as the contact with Bantu languages and the history of Brazilian (il)literacy, which adopted EP as a model, despite the different paths followed by both varieties. We highlight the contributions of Pagotto (1998), who attests that enclisis was used in Brazil during the 19th century to imitate EP syntax, although proclisis was dominant in Classical Portuguese, which had reached Brazil during the colonial period. We conducted a statistical analysis based on Parametric Sociolinguistics, associating the Theory of Variation and Change (Weinreich; Labov; Herzog, 2006 [1968]) to grammatical descriptions of the phenomenon based on generative syntax studies. The data comes from theatre plays written between 1840 and 1990, in which we expect to find an approximation between 19th century and early 20th century EP and BP, in addition to the subsequent implementation of a Brazilian norm that avoided proclisis until the first decades of the 20th century, followed by the recovery of aspects found in CP and the implementation of Brazilian innovations in the system. Meanwhile, EP remains stable, since it had already gone through a series of changes that favored enclisis in the absence of proclisis attractors. The hypotheses are based on the fact that Brazilian playwrights from the beginning of the 19th century were part of a literate minority that corresponded to 0.5% of the country's population (Houaiss, 1988 [1985]). Educated in Lisbon or in exclusive Brazilian schools, they reproduced Portuguese syntax, opting for enclisis and using clitics that, in BP, are the result of schooling, not of language acquisition. We argue that the indefinite clitic se, and the third person accusative o and the dative lhe are frequently used in 19th - century plays due to the same attempt to bring BP closer to EP. Nevertheless, their abandonment over time and the preference for variant forms reveal that such forms have never been part of Brazilians’ natural repertoire. The statistical analysis uses the Goldvarb-X logistic program. The results confirm the attempt to reproduce EP in the early synchronies and clarify the moment in diachrony when Brazilian plays begin to reveal the grammar of vernacular BP.