Clitic position and clitic placement in complex predicates: Brazilian Portuguese viewed from two trends

Abstract

In this paper we revisit the hypothesis according to which Brazilian Portuguese is formed by two trends – the cultured norm and the vernacular or popular norm – with focus on the problem of the position and placement of pronominal clitics in complex predicates. To do so, we have constructed a database composed of letters written at different moments of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and classified according to the education level of their authors. Two structure types were identified: infinitival periphrases and compound tenses. First, we have described the variation in the application of clitic climbing in the nineteenth century data, in order to identify the relevant factor groups, which were very similar to those found for European Portuguese. Subsequently, we have analyzed the quantitative evolution of clitic position and placement until the twentieth century from the classification between cultured and non-cultured authors, with the help of a grammar competition model. We have noticed, regarding clitic position, that the change was parallel in the two studied trends. This suggests that the hypothesis that the trends formed by cultured and non-cultured speakers tend to come closer to each other is a generalization that depends on the sensitivity of each studied phenomenon to external variables, and that syntactic phenomena such as clitic position tend to be less sensitive to such variables.