Aspectos condicionadores do objeto nulo e do pronome pleno em português brasileiro : uma análise da fala infantil

Abstract

The usage of Brazilian Portuguese pronouns has undergone changes. According to Cyrino (1994/1997), Nunes (1993) and Bagno (2011) among others), since 19st century, the use of the accusative clitic for the third person (o, a) has decreased. To recover an anaphoric element in a direct object position, speakers use two strategies instead of the clitic: the full pronoun (he ‘ele’, she ‘ela’), or the null direct object. The choice of using the full pronoun or null object is not random, before, this choice is made by the influence of semantic features (and maybe discourse features) associated with the referent for the pronominal anaphor. The literature shows that features of animacy, specificity, definiteness and semantic gender condition the use of full pronouns and null objects in Brazilian Portuguese and this is what we investigate in our work. Our central hypothesis is that only one of these referent characteristics may be the one which triggers the use of the full pronoun or null object: it would be the semantic gender feature. Another of our hypothesis is that the use of a null category on anaphoric recapture in object position (a null object) is the default strategy, unmarked in BP (in contrast, the use of a pronoun in this place is the marked strategy). To confirm our hypothesis, we have analyzed the speech of children of 1 to 9 years old, from the corpora CEAAL (PUCRS) and PEUL (UFRJ). Our hypothesis that the semantic gender feature is enough to explain the condition of anaphoric resume in BP proved to be inconclusive, but it seems to be promising, as the results analyzed from the semantic gender of the referents seem to polarize better the recaptures between null objects and full pronouns. Furthermore, it is better to explain a phenomenon by only one trace and not by a combination of features. Our hypothesis that the unmarked way to resume a null object in BP is through an empty category was confirmed after analyzing the data from our corpus, and we believe that on kids’ speech the use of null objects is generalized, because the empty category happens in cases in which we hoped to see a pronoun.